An internal memo floating around the U.S. State Department is urging senior officials to rethink their approach to the Israel-Hamas war, criticizing the U.S.’s unwavering support of Israel’s counteroffensive as backing “crimes against humanity.”
The five-page memo, signed by 100 State Department and USAID employees, also accuses President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation” in his October 10 speech, in which Biden described Hamas’s October 7 massacre as an “act of sheer evil” and likened it to the “worst rampages of ISIS” while unequivocally aligning the U.S.’s military capabilities with Israel.
“Members of the White House and (the National Security Council) displayed a clear disregard for the lives of Palestinians, a documented unwillingness to de-escalate, and, even prior to October 7, a reckless lack of strategic foresight,” the memo said, reported Axios.
The bulk of the memo focuses on condemning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza, which has constituted attacking hospitals, cutting off access to water and electricity, limiting humanitarian aid, and displacing 1.6 million Palestinians.
All of these actions, according to the memo, “constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity under international law.”
“Yet we have failed to reassess our posture towards Israel,” the memo reads, according to the outlet. “We doubled down on our unwavering military assistance to the (Israeli government) without clear or actionable redlines.”
It’s not the first such memo to be leaked out of the State Department. Last week, another memo blasted the U.S. response to Israel as inappropriate, arguing that supporting the Middle Eastern state’s “settler violence” went “against American values,” reported Politico.