State Department official Annelle Sheline resigned Wednesday criticising US President Joe Biden’s “horrific policy” toward Israel. Sheline accused the Biden administration for allowing a “genocide” to happen in Gaza. She announced her resignation in an op-ed published in news broadcaster CNN’s website.
“For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. 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 told later while speaking to CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
She said she was willing to “resign quietly” but later decided to go public with her resignation. “But when I started to tell people that I was planning to resign quietly, they said, you know, please reconsider, please, please go public if you’d be willing to. So I decided I would,” she said.
She joined Josh Paul, a senior official in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and Tariq Habash, a Biden appointee in the administration, who also resigned over Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a retaliatory measure for October 7 terror attacks.
The war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack that resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians. The terrorists also took about 250 hostages. Israel says about 130 captives remain in Gaza, including 34 presumed dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 32,552 people, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Sheline resigned from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor .
“Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State,” she wrote.
US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that Sheline left the department after finishing her “first year of a fellowship that could have gone for two years” and said that she “did not exercise her option to return for a second year as a fellow”.
State Department top official Josh Paul stepped down in October as the administration accelerated arms transfers to Israel.
Tariq Habash, a Biden administration appointee who had worked in the education department to help overhaul the student loan system and address inequities in higher education, submitted his resignation to protest the administration’s crucial military support of Israel’s war in Gaza and its handling of the conflict’s repercussions at home and abroad.
The other non-Biden administration official to resign over Biden’s support for Israel was 25-year-old airman, Aaron Bushnell, of San Antonio, Texas.
“I am an active member of the US Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people are going through in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all. It’s what our ruling class has deemed normal. Free Palestine,” Bushnell said before setting himself ablaze outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, in February, while livestreaming his act of protest on Twitch.
(with inputs from Associated Press)
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