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The Trump administration has reportedly rescinded a Biden-era policy requiring countries that receive weapons from the U.S. to comply with international law and support humanitarian aid deliveries, despite ongoing concerns that U.S. ally Israel has used American materiel in human rights abuses.
A February 21 order from National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, obtained by The Washington Post, declares that Trump is immediately canceling Biden’s February 2024 arms transfer memo, known as NSM-20.
“This move … undermines American taxpayers’ right to ensure the use of their dollars aligns with our laws and our national interest,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat who helped craft the memo with the previous White House, said in a statement about the reports.
“It’s another clear example of Trump’s blatant indifference to American values,” he added. “This is not America first — it’s America in retreat.”
The memo, which largely reiterated previous policies and statutory requirements on U.S. arms transfers, required the secretary of State to get “credible and reliable” assurances from U.S. partners that arms would be used in accordance with international law, and threatened those who didn’t comply with being cut off from further support.
The reported move comes after the Trump administration has also reportedly worked to eliminate a Pentagon office focused on stopping civilian deaths in U.S. military campaigns.
The Biden policy, which doesn’t name any particular nation, came about amid concerns that staunch U.S. ally Israel was using American arms to commit alleged war crimes, including targeting schools, hospitals, refugee camps, civilian safe zones, and aid convoys with attacks.
Some, like conservative Republican Senator Jim Risch, a top official on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticized the requirements at the time, arguing they were “anti-Israel and calls into question the reliability of the administration.”
Other lawmakers complained that while the requirements reiterated existing U.S. human rights policy, it wasn’t being followed in any case while Israel nevertheless received $18 billion of U.S. aid during its war with Hamas.
Throughout his time in office, President Biden largely supported the Israeli military effort, despite occasionally voicing concerns over a civilian death toll that’s included an estimated 46,000 Palestinians and over 1,100 Israelis.
In late 2023, then-National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters he was “not in a position to be judge and jury” on whether Israel was following the laws of war, and slammed Hamas for “making life extremely difficult for Israel by taking civilians as human shields and by putting their rocket infrastructure and terrorist infrastructure among civilians.”
In the concluding moments of the Biden administration last fall, the former president said he would not limit weapons to Israel, despite human rights groups saying the country had fallen nearly ten times too short of a U.S. benchmark of allowing at least 350 aid trucks per day into the besieged territory.
The Trump administration has signaled it will be even more supportive than Biden of Israel, even as the conflict becomes what human rights observers and international courts have alleged is a genocide, which Israel denies.
Trump has suggested the U.S. could occupy Gaza and temporarily remove hundreds of thousands of people from the territory in a move critics have deemed ethnic cleansing.
Fighting between Israel and Hamas has slowed since a January ceasefire, but the deal is on shaky ground given recent terror attacks inside of Israel and a provocative Hamas handover of the remains of Israeli hostages, which the latter said contained the wrongfully attributed remains of a missing Israeli mother.
