‘Tired of writing about dead kids’: why a US state department worker resigned over Israel-Gaza policy | Biden administration

When Mike Casey arrived in Jerusalem in 2020, he wasn’t looking for a fight.

An army veteran with a stint in Iraq who joined the state department for over a decade of postings across Asia, he came with the measured optimism of a career diplomat – two years of Arabic training ahead, a potential change in administration, and a chance to make a difference. He’d eventually work his way up the ranks to become the state department’s deputy political counselor on Gaza.

What he didn’t anticipate was becoming a key witness to what he describes as a systematic failure of US foreign policy.

“The more informed you become on this issue, you can’t avoid realizing how bad it is,” Casey told the Guardian.

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.”

Casey’s work function included documenting the humanitarian and political landscape through classified cables, research and reporting. But his disillusionment wasn’t sudden. It was a slow accumulation of bureaucratic betrayals – each report dismissed, each humanitarian concern bulldozed by political expediency.

“We would write daily updates on Gaza,” he said. Colleagues used to joke, he said, that they could attach cash to the reports and still nobody would read them.

According to the latest UN figures, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with 90% of the population displaced and facing catastrophic humanitarian conditions that teeter on the brink of famine. Despite international legal interventions – including the international court of justice’s order to halt military operations in Rafah earlier this year and the international criminal court’s pursuit of war crimes charges against Israeli leaders – the conflict continues unabated, with humanitarian aid barely preventing total collapse.

Months after the aerial bombardment and subsequent ground invasion of Gaza began after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, the post-war planning meetings became a particular source of frustration.

Casey said he and his colleagues developed comprehensive strategies for Gaza’s reconstruction, only to have them systematically rejected. “We outlined three key angles,” he explained. “Humanitarian aid, security infrastructure and governance. We outlined connecting Gaza with the West Bank, pushing for Palestinian Authority to assert its control in Gaza at the gubernatorial and ministerial levels, and the needs for elections at some point.”

But each proposal, whether through reports or meetings in Washington, met the same response: “Every idea we came up with, [the Biden administration] would just say, ‘Well, the Israelis have another idea.’”

Those Israeli proposals – which included having local clans run Gaza – struck him as not just impractical, but deliberately destructive.

“We wrote numerous reports and cables explaining why this wouldn’t work,” he said. “It’s not in our interest to have warlords running Gaza.”

An internal job description obtained by the Guardian confirmed Casey’s role, noting that he was the “lead political reporting officer on internal politics and security issues in the Gaza Strip and on Palestinian reconciliation issues”.

“The officer leads the Mission’s interagency efforts on Gaza, and is the back-up for Gaza economic issues,” it goes on.

The office of Palestinian affairs had been formally established in 2022, and was meant to be a cornerstone of US engagement, communication, policy and analysis when it came to the Palestinian Authority and the territories, housing a couple dozen Americans and around 75 local staffers.

Its roots lie in the US Consulate General in Jerusalem, which merged with the US embassy when then president Donald Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel in 2019.

However its influence has been overshadowed by the broader state department response during this conflict, which took the lead on high-level diplomatic efforts like de-escalation and negotiations, security coordination with Israel and engagement with other regional and international allies. The national security council also plays a central role in developing and implementing US policy while advising the president, along with the Pentagon, providing military aid to Israel.

In response to Casey’s claims, a state department spokesperson told the Guardian: “We’ve repeatedly said that Israel must not only comply with international humanitarian law but must also take every feasible step to prevent civilian harm – this is a moral and strategic imperative.”

When Trump left office, Casey had initially hoped the Biden administration would represent a more balanced approach, but it instead disappointed him at every turn.

One particularly galling moment came near the onset of the war, when Joe Biden publicly questioned casualty numbers – which had been estimated at around 8,300 killed in under a month – numbers that Casey himself had documented.

“I was the one writing the reports,” he said. “What’s the point of me writing this stuff, if you’re just going to disregard it?”

The White House’s national security council did not respond to a request for comment.

Unlike his previous diplomatic postings in Malaysia, China and Pakistan, Casey found direct negotiations with Israeli officials fundamentally different when it came to how the US uses its leverage.

“In Malaysia, if you didn’t cooperate, you could get sanctioned,” he explains. “With Pakistan, we could pull training programs, stop certain aid.”

“But with the Israelis, it’s completely different. They just have to drag out negotiations and we’ll eventually agree to whatever they want.”

When asked for comment, Israel’s spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs Oren Marmorstein said: “We see no need to respond to baseless accusations stemming solely from the frustration of a former employee.”

By the time Casey left in July, Palestinians had received around $674m in total US assistance, compared with the White House’s record-breaking green light of $17.9bn in military aid to Israel over the course of the year by October. At one point, Biden signed into law a one-year ban on funding Unrwa, which supports Palestinian refugees in the region as part of this year’s $1.2tn federal appropriations package, though funding for Unrwa USA – which is a separate entity – has resumed.

Casey isn’t the only career staffer across multiple levels of US foreign policy to feel frustration and disillusionment. There were high-profile resignations from the state department over the last year, including the political-military affairs director Josh Paul, the deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, Andrew Miller, the foreign affairs officer Annelle Sheline and the diplomat Hala Rharrit.

But what stands out about Casey’s walk is the extent of his proximity and direct policy analysis with the conflict and the quiet exit that didn’t include a public resignation.

“I was too embarrassed to continue being an American diplomat,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t go to another assignment and function.”

To some analysts of Middle East affairs, the administration’s approach that resulted in officials quitting reached a level of dysfunction that was exceptional in its stagnancy.

“We’ve been meeting to talk about a ceasefire for many, many months,” said Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Middle East Institute’s program on Palestine and Israel-Palestinian affairs who often meets with and advises administration officials. “The thing that I was struck by is how little they had actually moved. Every time that we saw them, it was remarkable. There was no moving of the needle, virtually at all.”

To others, the administration’s own metrics became an indictment of its approach.

Yousef Munayyer, head of Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington DC, noted that the handling of humanitarian aid had reached “a low that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before”.

He described a calculated strategy where the administration was “deliberately using this instrument of humanitarian aid as a way to buy time and diffuse some tension among their own base to show that they’re trying to do something”.

In October, the United States issued Israel a 30-day ultimatum demanding in a leaked letter at least 350 truckloads of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Despite the explicit requests and aid levels plummeting far below the benchmarks, the Biden administration explained it would not limit arms deals when the time expired because it had seen limited progress.

The latest data from Mercy Corps and other relief agencies found that Gaza’s humanitarian crisis is still spiraling below the levels for basic human needs, with just 65 aid trucks now entering Gaza daily – a reduction from the pre-war average of 500 trucks.

Far from diplomacy, Casey now works at a local bank, where he watches from afar and his criticisms extend beyond a single administration. He sees a systemic failure in US policy towards Palestinians – a complete absence of a coherent strategy that in turn hurts Israelis too and remains viscerally personal.

“I remember two children killed in a ramming attack at a bus stop in Jerusalem who were the same age as my kids,” Casey said. “You see the effect the conflict has on people in Israel as well. Israelis deserve better, not just Palestinians.”

His ultimate assessment?

“We don’t have a policy on Palestine. We just do what the Israelis want us to do.”