(Photo credit: Reuters / Amir Cohen)
The Cradle
OCT 8, 2026
Reports on slain Palestinian US citizens and rampant settler violence were buried or rewritten to praise Netanyahu instead
A senior aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been blocking and rewriting embassy reports to Washington to whitewash Israeli crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the New York Times reported on 8 October.
David Milstein, who joined the US embassy in Jerusalem in April 2025 and serves as a de facto chief of staff to Huckabee, oversees much of the mission’s work on the West Bank and Gaza.
According to a dozen people who deal with him in Jerusalem and Washington, he has used that role to repeatedly suppress or doctor cables on illegal Israeli settlement expansion, settler attacks, the killings of Palestinian US citizens, and deadly aid distribution in Gaza.
Among the reports Milstein buried was a March embassy review of the killings of nine Palestinian US citizens by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank over four years. The latest, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, was shot dead by a settler in February as he tried to stop the theft of his village’s livestock.
The review was compiled after 30 members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio for answers. It found that most investigations had gone nowhere, some had been closed, and not one person had been charged.
Rather than send it, Milstein pushed for a reply assuring lawmakers that Israel was handling the cases properly. The State Department letter that reached Van Hollen on 4 May withheld the findings, pointing instead to the embassy’s wartime focus on security cooperation with Israel.
“If you don’t get accountability, you endanger more American citizens,” Van Hollen said.
In the summer of 2025, Palestinians seeking food were being shot dead en masse at the sites of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli scheme that turned aid distribution into a death trap and killed at least 1,400 aid seekers.
As the killing went on, embassy diplomats warned Washington that the operation risked further mass casualties; however, Milstein rewrote the cable to hail it as a success, erasing the dead from the record entirely.
In April – after senior Israeli commanders warned that surging Israeli settler attacks across the occupied West Bank could spark a new Palestinian uprising – Milstein blocked staff reports relaying the warning, and Washington instead received a cable under his name crediting Netanyahu with cracking down on the violence.
In February, when Israel revoked long-standing legal barriers to Israeli land purchases in the occupied West Bank, a move condemned internationally as fast-tracking annexation, the embassy told Washington the policy served settlers’ “humanitarian needs,” without explaining further.
Milstein also reportedly subjected colleagues to loyalty tests, demanding to know whether they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas,” four officials said, leaving staff afraid to speak.
Under his watch, some stopped writing reports altogether rather than see them censored, and cables on Palestinian affairs dwindled from several a week to a handful a month.
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