Palestinians sue State Department over U.S. military assistance to Israel

Palestinian families are suing the State Department over U.S. support for Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip which has killed tens of thousands of people and led to a humanitarian crisis in the besieged enclave.

In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, the plaintiffs from Gaza, the occupied West Bank and the United States accuse Washington of creating exceptions for its close ally Israel to circumvent the 1997 Leahy law, which bars foreign military aid when there is evidence of human rights abuses.

“My surviving family members in Gaza have been forcibly displaced four times since October, living in constant fear of indiscriminate Israeli attacks carried out with American weapons,” one of the plaintiffs, Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American, said in a statement published by the legal nonprofit Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, which helped bring the lawsuit.

“The U.S. government’s military assistance to these abusive Israeli forces, which our own laws prohibit, is enabling these Israeli harms to me and my family,” added Moor, one of five plaintiffs in the case.

NBC News has reached out to the State Department for comment.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Tuesday that he “wasn’t aware” of the case, “but in any event I’d defer to the Department of Justice, who typically request that we not comment on cases that they’re going to have to respond to in court.”