Another State Department official quit in frustration over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy:
Casey resigned from the state department in July after four years at the job, discreetly leaving the post unlike other recent high-profile government departures. Now seated at his kitchen table in the quiet suburbs of northern Michigan, Casey reflected on how, as one of only two people in the entire US government explicitly focused on Gaza, he became an unwilling chronicler of a humanitarian catastrophe.
“I got so tired of writing about dead kids,” he said. “Just constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”
The Biden administration’s policy in Gaza has been a cautionary tale of what not to do in response to a conflict. Biden threw his full support behind a military campaign that was sure to be brutal and atrocious, he refused to use U.S. influence to bring it to an end, he rushed to shield the perpetrators from the consequences of their aggressive actions, and he ignored the laws that required him to cut off arms transfers. In the process, he put U.S. forces in harm’s way and even launched an illegal bombing campaign in Yemen rather than apply any pressure on Netanyahu. Throughout all of it, the Biden administration has shown a ghoulish contempt for Palestinian lives.
The Israeli government’s slaughter and starvation in Gaza have been going for more than fourteen months. Each week brings fresh stories of more atrocities that our government enables and supports. Every day that passes without a permanent ceasefire and an end to the siege is another day that more innocent people are being blown up, shot, and starved to death.
The war in Gaza is a genocidal campaign. That is what Amnesty International concluded in their extensive report. This week Human Rights Watch said that the Israeli government is committing acts of genocide by deliberately depriving Palestinian civilians of adequate access to water. The U.S. has been unconditionally backing a profoundly destructive and evil war for more than a year, and we must not look away from the horrors that our government abets. Here is a brief review of some of the latest reporting and analysis of what the Israeli government has done to the people of Gaza with U.S. help.
Last month, a retired surgeon spoke before a parliamentary committee in the UK and testified about how Israeli forces would use drones to attack surviving civilians in the wake of bombings. The surgeon, Prof. Nizam Mamode, said:
The drones would come down and pick off civilians – children.
We [were] operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’
That’s clearly a deliberate act and it was a persistent act – persistent targeting of civilians day after day.
Mamode’s testimony is consistent with the accounts of many American medical workers that served in Gaza. They have also reported numerous instances of treating young children with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.