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Two executive branch officials have resigned from their positions within the Biden administration due to the White House’s collaboration with Israel in its bombing and starvation campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.
The officials who resigned are Alexander Smith, a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and a senior adviser within that agency on gender, maternal health, child health and nutrition; and Stacy Gilbert, a State Department official within the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
The resignations come as Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians since October, with thousands more presumed to be buried under the rubble.
Smith, who has worked in his role for four years, was told that he either had to resign or be dismissed from his position after he had prepared a presentation on maternal health and child mortality for Palestinians that was abruptly canceled last week by higher-ups at USAID.
“I cannot do my job in an environment in which specific people cannot be acknowledged as fully human, or where gender and human rights principles apply to some, but not to others, depending on their race,” Smith said in his resignation letter.
Gilbert’s decision to resign was due to her agency’s false determination that Israel wasn’t purposely manufacturing a famine by blocking food and other desperately-needed aid from entering Gaza, as well as the administration’s downplaying of the atrocities committed by Israeli forces.
Gilbert, who has 20 years of experience in global crises and conflicts, explained her decision to quit the State Department to HuffPost, saying:
Because I try very hard to understand what international humanitarian law is about, it also gives me credibility in saying what is happening in Gaza is not according to international humanitarian law.
Nine officials have resigned from the Biden administration since Israel began its bloody siege of Gaza in October. More resignations are likely to come, said Josh Paul, the first official to have publicly resigned from the administration over the White House’s participation in the genocide.
“I’m aware that there are other resignations pending in the near future from officials with similar concerns in their own areas of work,” said Paul, who had served as the director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.
Paul added that at least two dozen officials have resigned in protest without making a public declaration of their resignations.
Among those who have resigned so far is Lily Greenberg Call, the former special assistant to the Interior Department’s chief of staff and the first Jewish person within the administration to quit because of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Said Call in her resignation announcement:
My whole life has been spent in Jewish community in the U.S. and Israel. People in my community lost loved ones during Hamas’s attack on October 7th; beloveds killed, displaced, and taken as hostages. I am terrified by rising antisemitism around the world. And yet I am certain that the answer to this is not to collectively punish millions of innocent Palestinians through displacement, famine, and ethnic cleansing.
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