Biden team official flags plausible genocide in Gaza, resigns in protest

A US State Department official has resigned in protest of the Biden administration's support for Israel's war against the Gaza, accusing Washington of "directly enabling" a plausible genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

Annelle Sheline, 38, who worked as a foreign affairs officer in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, wrote in an article for CNN that she was "unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities," and resigned.

"However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible," she wrote.

"Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began," she said.

Sheline said she decided to publicly resign because her colleagues' response was: "Please speak for us."

She added that across the federal government, employees like her have tried for months to "influence policy, both internally and, when that failed, publicly."

Noting that the State Department ascertained that Israel is in compliance with international law in its conduct of the war and in providing humanitarian assistance, Sheline wrote: "To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to airdrop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration's claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians."

Sheline said she was "haunted" by the final social media post of 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell who died after self-immolating in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on February 25 in protest of Israel's war against Gaza.

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now," Bushnell wrote in the post.

Sheline said she could no longer continue to do what she was doing.

"I hope that my resignation can contribute to the many efforts to push the administration to withdraw support for Israel's war, for the sake of the 2 million Palestinians whose lives are at risk and for the sake of America's moral standing in the world," she added.

Asked about the resignation, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that there is a "broad diversity of views inside the State Department about the US' policy on Gaza."

Other resignations

"What we try to do in the State Department, what the Secretary (Antony Blinken) has instructed his team to do is to make sure that people have an opportunity to make their views known," said Miller.

Sheline's resignation is the second publicly announced protest resignation from the agency since October 7 after Josh Paul, former director of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, publicly announced his resignation October 19.

"I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the continued - indeed, expanded and expedited - provision of lethal arms to Israel - I have reached the end of that bargain," said Paul, who worked on arms transfers for more than 11 years, in his two-page resignation letter.

Tariq Habash, a political appointee at the Education Department, also resigned in January, citing the Biden administration's approach to the Gaza conflict and its failure to halt what he termed as Israel's "collective punishment tactics."

Israel's war on besieged Palestinians of Gaza — now in its 174th day — has killed at least 32,490 people, 70 percent of them women and children, and wounded 74,889 others.

More than 90 percent of Gaza's population of 2.3 million have fled their homes, with most seeking refuge in the southernmost city of Rafah, which Israel calls the next target of its ground invasion.

Israel's hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected global pleas including those from its ally United States to avoid invasion of Rafah.