US Official Resigned After Being “so Tired of Writing About Dead Kids” in Gaza

Washington (Quds News Network)- Mike Casey, the U.S. State Department’s Deputy Political Counsellor for Gaza, resigned in July over the administration’s policy toward Israel’s assault in the besieged enclave, stating he was “tired of writing about dead kids in Gaza.”

Casey, a US Army veteran who served in Iraq and one of two individuals in the entire government explicitly focused on Gaza, told The Guardian in an interview on Wednesday that he quietly submitted his resignation in July after four years at the State Department.

Casey reflected on how 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. “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.”

Casey told The Guardian that 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, The Guardian said.

“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.”

Casey’s job description included serving as the “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.

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

The US Office of Palestinian Affairs, established in 2022 to serve as the core of American engagement with Palestinians, has seen its ability to manoeuvre and influence US policy overshadowed by the Biden administration’s broader response to Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.

One particularly frustrating moment occurred early in the war when Joe Biden publicly questioned the casualty figures—estimated at around 8,300 killed in less than a month—figures 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?”

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.”

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

“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.”

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

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.

Casey now works at a local bank in Michigan.

He is not the first US official to resign since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza. 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.