“We write to address the apparent gap in the application of these principles in connection with possible violations of U.S. law by Israeli government forces, citizens, and others acting in concert with them,” the letter states.

“Despite compelling evidence of violations of U.S. law… the Department took no public steps to hold the perpetrators accountable, even if the victims were U.S. citizens.

“(T)he Ministry’s silence and apparent inaction is utter negligence,” he adds.

The letter’s authors say that, unlike the U.S. State Department, the justice department does not have an informal mechanism to help officials express dissent. It is unclear how widely the views expressed in the letter were shared among the thousands of attorneys who work in the department.

Their letters mention the names of five US citizens killed in the occupied West Bank: Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, Tevfik Abdel Jabbar, Muhammed Khdur, Ömer Assad and Shireen Abu Akleh. Their families demanded that Israeli forces or settlers allegedly responsible for their deaths be held accountable.

The report also includes the cases of American aid worker Jacob Flickinger, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, and US citizen Kamel Ahmad Jawad, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.

Two of the lawyers who wrote the letter, both career federal prosecutors at the Ministry of Justice, spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity. They signed the letter to Mr. Garland as “your colleague.”

One of them told the BBC that the apparent lack of action over the Americans’ deaths showed the justice department was acting as a “political apparatus” for its ally. Second, the issue described “disparate treatment” of U.S. citizens “with ties to Palestinians.”

The lawyer said: “This is a no-brainer… Everyone at the Department of Justice agrees that the murder of an American citizen is a non-starter. You don’t do that. And the silence here is deafening.”