"We have encouraged the Israelis to come to the council and to tell their story and to present their own narrative of their own human rights situation," said Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, the US representative to the United Nations' Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday.
Tel Aviv cut all ties with the 47-member state council last March after it announced it would probe how Israeli illegal settlements may be infringing on the rights of the Palestinians.
The Jewish regime is not a member of the council but like all 193 UN countries it is required to undergo Universal Periodic Reviews (UPR) of its human rights situation.
Israel is scheduled for a UPR next Tuesday, but has given no indication it will take part in the process.
If the Zionist regime is not represented at the review, it will mark the first time since the reviews began in 2007 that Tel Aviv country under evaluation is absent, and it remains unclear how the rights council will react.
"The United States is absolutely, fully behind the Universal Periodic Review and we do not want to see the mechanism in any way harmed," Donahoe said, responding to questions at a conference at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
She said the council and its president, Remigiusz Henczel of Poland, had been working around the clock to determine if the review should go ahead even if Israel doesn't show up, and what kind of sanctions might be appropriate.
"Our very strong hope is that the outcome protects the two overriding values of universality ... and the cooperative, collaborative nature of the process," Donahoe said.
The Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki announced on Wednesday that Palestine would take legal action against Israel at the International Criminal Court (ICC) if the Tel Aviv regime builds new settler units on the occupied Palestinian lands.
More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.