Two US lawmakers filed a report saying Israel is committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the occupied West Bank

US Senators Say ‘America Complicit’ in
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians after Visit
Syma Mohammed / Middle East Eye

(September 12, 2025) — US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley released a report on Thursday saying that the US is complicit in Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine.

Van Hollen of Maryland and Merkley of Oregon produced the report after a week-long visit to Israel, the occupied West Bank, the Rafah border with Gaza, Jordan and Egypt at the end of August. The damning 21-page report is titled, “The Netanyahu Government is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It.”

The report observed that overwhelming evidence shows “Israel is…implementing a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and dealing a death blow to the vision of a future Palestinian state”.

The senators also decried Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump’s framing of their plan for Palestinians to voluntarily depart from Gaza as a “cruel hoax” and “one of the most fraudulent, sinister, and twisted cover stories ever told”.

“Departure is not ‘voluntary’ when the conditions needed to support life are extinguished,” the report said.

They also concluded that Netanyahu’s policies in the occupied West Bank constitute ethnic cleansing “in slow motion”.

The report said that “the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure and the use of food and humanitarian assistance as a weapon of war were used “to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population”.

The unprecedented report is a rare example of American lawmakers highlighting US complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

Both senators held a press conference about their report at the US Capitol, on the 24th anniversary of 9/11, an event which led to then-President George Bush declaring America’s so-called “war on terror”.

Destruction of Civilian Infrastructure
Although the pair were not able to enter Gaza, they were given a tour of the border area with Gaza by Egyptian officials, from which they could see into Gaza and witness firsthand “the devastation and destruction”.

“Rafah had been reduced to rubble,” the report said, acknowledging that at least 270,000 Palestinians lived there before the war.

They outlined in the report that “the systematic destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure has been well documented by others and confirmed in our conversations with credible and reliable sources in Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Egypt”.

They acknowledged that the campaign of destruction included the destruction or damage of 92 percent of housing units, 94 percent of the enclave’s hospitals, 92 percent of schools and university buildings, and 86 percent of water and sanitation facilities.

“Aerial footage and before-and-after photos of much of Gaza show an apocalyptic ruin. We heard firsthand accounts of how this was part of an intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools, and other civilian sites,” the report read.

Aid as a Weapon of War
The report accuses the Netanyahu government of “willfully” obstructing the flow of food and other humanitarian aid into Gaza as “collective punishment on the population of Gaza for the sins of Hamas”.

They said that Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, the scandal-plagued aid scheme backed by the US and Israel, were built as tools to restrict the flow of food and control the movement of the population to the point where Palestinians find it so unbearable that they “volunteer” to depart.

The senators concluded that overwhelming evidence showed that Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, which manages the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, is intentionally slowing down the delivery of such aid to help with ethnic cleansing.

This has impacted the United Nations and the World Food Programme (WFP), which were both consulted for the report.

The WFP informed the senators that it had sufficient food to feed people in Gaza for three weeks, which is being stored in approximately 2,200 shipping containers. However, because Israel has implemented new screening procedures — resulting in the deliberate and unnecessary slowdown of the flow of food into Gaza — WFP has only been able to screen 20-30 food containers per day.

While the report detailed the obstacles that aid organisations have faced at crossings directly into Gaza, it also shared the challenges they have faced coming in from Jordan, which have been documented less.

The senators found that unnecessary screening and red tape meant that less than one-tenth of humanitarian aid entering Gaza via the Jordan Corridor was able to make it through.

This is despite the fact that the US had provided 280 trucks and helped build 10 warehouses to triple the capacity for humanitarian aid along the Jordan Corridor, enabling 150 trucks per day of aid.

They also shared how the US had spent about $1.5 million to purchase advanced screening machines, following a request by the Israeli government, but since the ceasefire ended in March, “Israel no longer accepts trucks screened at the US facility”.

According to the report, in the past month, almost half (42 percent) of the trucks in each convoy — typically 60-85 trucks, three times a week — were forced to turn back for one reason or another. This rejection rate was for a much smaller number of trucks (180-255 per week) travelling along the Jordan Corridor, compared to its peak (600-900 per week).

In addition, each truck was subject to a new $400 customs processing fee. If they did not pass through the screening process, they had to pay the $400 fee again to have the truck join a later convoy.

The senators said that Jordanian officials told them convoys were coming under increasingly frequent attacks by violent settlers and protesters in recent weeks, who slashed tires and “inserted substances into the diesel tanks to render the trucks inoperable”.

Overall, the senators concluded that “the world has a moral and legal obligation to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing… Strong words alone will not be sufficient. The world must impose penalties and costs on those who are implementing this plan”.

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