Snip:

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.