Jakarta, Indonesia Sentinel — A senior U.S. State Department official specializing in Gaza has resigned over the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war in the Palestinian enclave. Mike Casey decided to resign out of frustration with U.S. policy, saying he was tired from reporting on the deaths of children in Palestine.
According to The Guardian, Mike Casey, a former U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq, has quietly submitted his resignation in July after four years at the State Department. Mike Casey one of only two officials in the U.S. government dedicated specifically to Gaza.
“We don’t have a policy on Palestine. We just do whatever Israel wants,” Casey said. “I was too ashamed to keep being a U.S. diplomat. I knew I couldn’t go to another posting and function effectively.”
Casey’s role involved serving as the State Department’s lead political reporting officer on internal politics and security issues in the Gaza Strip and on Palestinian reconciliation issues, according to an internal job posting obtained by The Guardian.
Casey said he and his colleagues proposed several strategies to help reconstruct Gaza, but all were dismissed. “Every idea we came up with, [the Biden administration] would just say, ‘Well, the Israelis have another idea’,” Casey explained.
Those Israeli proposals included handing over Gaza’s administration to local clans, struck him as not just impractical, but deliberately destructive.
“We wrote countless reports and cables explaining why that wouldn’t work,” he said. “It’s not in our interest to allow warlords to control Gaza.”
The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs, established in June 2022 under the State Department, oversees U.S. relations with the Palestinian Authority and handles policy issues in the West Bank and Gaza. The office is central to Washington’s engagement with Palestinians.
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As part of his duties, Casey also documented Gaza’s humanitarian and political crises through classified reporting. He recalled a particularly striking moment early in the conflict when President Joe Biden publicly questioned Gaza’s death toll figures—numbers Casey himself had verified.
“I was the one writing those reports,” Casey said. “What’s the point of me writing these things if you’re just going to ignore them?”
He added, “I was so tired of writing about dead children. Constantly having to prove to Washington that these kids really were dead, only to see nothing change.”
Casey initially hoped the Biden administration would demonstrate a more balanced approach but was instead disappointed at every turn. Which caused his frustration and prompted his decision to resign.
U.S. Official Resignation
Casey, is not the first U.S. official to resign over the Biden administration’s policy on Gaza. More than a dozen officials across various federal agencies have stepped down, expressing frustration with Washington’s approach to the conflict.
Several high-level resignations have occurred at the State Department over the past year, including Director of Political-Military Affairs Josh Paul, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israel-Palestinian Affairs Andrew Miller, Foreign Affairs Officer Annelle Sheline, and diplomat Hala Rharrit.
(Raidi/Agung)
