Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, on Thursday plans to introduce a resolution that would order the Trump administration to provide Congress with a detailed accounting of Israel’s human rights practices in the West Bank, laying the groundwork to force a vote on the matter in coming weeks.
The measure, the latest bid by Democrats in Congress to challenge the policies and actions of Israel’s government, invokes a provision of the Foreign Assistance Act that allows lawmakers to request information from the State Department about the human rights record of any country receiving U.S. security assistance.
Co-signed by 10 Senate Democrats, the resolution is privileged, meaning that Mr. Van Hollen could force a vote on it even if Republican leaders refuse, as expected, to bring it to the floor. That could lead to yet another vote in Congress showcasing Democrats’ divide over Israel as a growing contingent in the party turns against the Jewish state.
“We’ve seen ongoing human rights violations on the West Bank, but we’re going from bad to abysmal,” Mr. Van Hollen said in an interview.
The resolution focuses on at least nine U.S. citizens who have been killed in the West Bank since January 2022, including Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist killed in 2022, and Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, who was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier in 2024. It argues that Israeli authorities have failed to punish those responsible and that American agencies have failed to conduct their own independent investigations or provide substantive information about existing ones.
“If the United States Senate shines a spotlight on this, we will save lives,” Mr. Van Hollen said. “We will save the lives of American citizens. We will also save the lives of Palestinian civilians.”
Concern about violence in the West Bank has steadily grown among Democrats in Congress. Last year, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, introduced the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, which Mr. Van Hollen cosponsored, to impose visa and financial sanctions on people who commit or facilitate violence against civilians there. The bill attracted broad Democratic support but did not advance out of the Republican-led Foreign Relations Committee and was never brought up for a vote.
J Street, the liberal pro-Israel advocacy group that backed that legislation, has argued that sanctions are needed to disrupt networks supporting extremist settlers and Palestinian militant groups and preserve the possibility of a two-state solution. The group has cited estimates that settler violence rose 30 percent during the first months of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier.
The issue has also prompted unusually sharp criticism from Israeli officials. Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States and a longtime settler, said earlier this year that extremist settler violence was a “stain” on Israel and was costing the country support in Washington. He said the Israeli government was taking this seriously.
The issue has gained renewed focus this month following a new spate of violence in the West Bank with extremists settlers trapping two Palestinian families in their homes in the Israeli-occupied territories. One of the homes is owned by Louai Abu Ridi, an American citizen, prompting condemnation from U.S. officials including Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, who called the actions of the settlers “thuggish” and said Israeli Defense Forces and local police had acted at his urging to “remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
“Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting,” Mr. Huckabee said in a social media post earlier this month.
Shortly after, Mr. Leiter echoed the remarks, saying in his own post that “you cannot settle the land through destabilizing and disruptive behavior, as my esteemed colleague Mike Huckabee brilliantly put it when he spoke of ‘unsettling behavior.’”
Extremist settlers have carried out at least 1,380 attacks in 250 communities in 2026, according to U.N. data from late July. Those settlers have faced a near-total lack of consequences.
Mr. Van Hollen’s resolution would draw in the legislative branch to confront the issue directly.
It would give the secretary of state 30 days to provide congressional committees with an unclassified report detailing what American officials know about the killings, the status of investigations and the identities of potential suspects and Israeli security units involved.
The administration would also have to determine whether credible information implicates any Israeli security units in such violence.
The resolution also demands information about Palestinian children held under Israeli military law, including allegations of torture and other mistreatment.
Mr. Van Hollen said the American deaths raised a broader question about Washington’s willingness to enforce its human rights laws against a close ally.
“If we can’t get accountability for them,” he said, “how are we actually implementing our human rights laws with respect to the government of Israel as it relates to the West Bank?”
“This has been building for a long time,” he added. “Enough is enough.”
