US embassy aide buried cables on West Bank abuses, NYT says

A senior adviser at the US Embassy in Jerusalem systematically suppressed, delayed and rewrote internal diplomatic cables to shield Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from scrutiny in Washington, including reports on settler violence and the killing of Palestinian Americans, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

David Milstein, principal aide to US Ambassador Mike Huckabee and an influential gatekeeper at the embassy since April 2025, repeatedly blocked assessments meant for senior policymakers, according to the newspaper’s investigation, The Express Tribune reported. The NYT said its findings were based on interviews with more than a dozen US officials and on internal State Department records.

Annexation warning quashed

In late March, Israel approved record expansions of settlements across the occupied West Bank. Embassy staff drafted an alert warning that the move risked crossing President Donald Trump’s explicit red line against annexation.

According to the report, Milstein quashed the memo, framed the land seizures as a domestic matter, and sent a revised text claiming the move addressed unspecified humanitarian needs of settlers.

Settler violence played down

When Israeli military commanders warned that attacks by settlers could set off a widespread Palestinian uprising, Milstein blocked dispatches suggesting that Israel had failed to act, the report said. Instead, a cable written under his name praised Netanyahu’s initiatives and said the authorities were actively tackling the violence.

Killings of Palestinian Americans

Milstein also suppressed a detailed embassy inquiry into the killings of nine Palestinian Americans by Israeli forces and settlers, effectively blocking accountability requests from members of the US Congress, according to the report.

Although the embassy’s findings showed that investigations had stalled without any criminal charges, the mission instead forwarded a different letter claiming that Israeli authorities were actively cooperating.

Gaza aid deaths edited out

The aide also edited reports on aid distribution by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to describe the operation as successful. He removed diplomatic warnings that the process was “chaotic, deadly” and risked “mass casualty events”, the report said.

Reporting dried up

Staff said the interventions caused reporting from the embassy’s Palestinian affairs section to fall from several cables a week to a few a month. Some officials began going around official embassy channels to get unfiltered information from the ground.

Denials

Huckabee rejected the report. “The elements of the story The New York Times is trying to assemble are so lacking in fact that it ranks up with other Times farcical endeavours,” he said. The State Department said its staff remained focused on advancing the administration’s foreign policy priorities.

Why it matters

If accurate, the report means that warnings about annexation, settler attacks on Palestinians and the deaths of US citizens were kept from decision-makers in Washington at a time of record settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. It comes in the same week that Israel shut down Britain’s consulate in occupied East Jerusalem in retaliation for UK sanctions over settler violence.

This article draws on reporting by The Express Tribune and The New York Times.