Mark Levin’s stepson systematically quashed US embassy reports on Israeli war crimes
TEHRAN — A senior official inside the U.S. Embassy in al-Quds (Jerusalem) has systematically suppressed and altered internal diplomatic cables to conceal Israeli land theft, regime-backed violence, and war crimes from Washington policymakers and Congress. According to an October 8 report in The New York Times, internal diplomatic documents and accounts from more than a dozen U.S. officials point to the outsized role of David Milstein, a 36-year-old senior adviser serving as chief of staff to Ambassador Mike Huckabee.
Since assuming the position in April 2025, Milstein has acted as an ideological gatekeeper, filtering how information about Israel reaches Washington. Milstein is the stepson of the ultra-Zionist American commentator Mark Levin and is engaged to the daughter of Moshe Feiglin, an extremist Israeli politician who has repeatedly called for the forced expulsion and total destruction of Palestinians in Gaza. Armed with broad authority over the West Bank and Gaza portfolios, Milstein forced all communications from the embassy section handling Palestinian affairs through his office, the NYT report says.
Cable traffic immediately collapsed from several detailed reports a week to a few a month, as career diplomats realized their field assessments would be blocked or rewritten. Milstein’s suppression was especially stark during major territorial moves. In late March, amidst heightened regional war, Israel approved a record expansion of illegal West Bank settlements. Embassy staff drafted an urgent memo warning Washington that Tel Aviv was violating President Donald Trump’s declared line against formal annexation, the report says.
Milstein killed the memo before it left al-Quds (Jerusalem). Furthermore, as armed settlers rampaged through Palestinian villages with army backing, diplomats drafted reports documenting the inaction of the regime. Milstein quashed those findings, authoring a replacement cable titled “Government Cracks Down on Escalating West Bank Violence” that praised Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime instead. The censorship also targeted investigations into direct Israeli attacks on civilians and foreign nationals.
Following the killings of nine Palestinian-Americans by Israeli forces and settlers, embassy officers compiled a detailed probe showing that Israeli authorities had stalled inquiries, charged zero perpetrators, and quietly closed cases. Milstein suppressed the findings, stonewalling efforts by lawmakers like Senator Chris Van Hollen and replacing the probe with a sanitized letter claiming Israel was pursuing accountability. He applied similar censorship to Gaza, burying cables warning that Israeli-managed aid sites were causing chaotic, mass-casualty events.
These revelations reveal a deliberate campaign inside the American diplomatic apparatus to protect Tel Aviv from international scrutiny as countries such as Britain, Canada, and France enact sanctions over West Bank settlement expansion. By altering official field reports and manufacturing a fabricated reality for Washington, American officials remain directly complicit in masking ongoing land theft, Israeli violence, and genocide against the Palestinian people.
Read the original article on tehrantimes.com (opens in a new tab)