Ahmed Moor thinks about his family in Gaza every day. His uncle has been seeking shelter from the relentless Israeli airstrikes for more than a year, and finding none. He has lost cousins and extended family to sniper fire and bombing.
Now, the Palestinian-American father of three is suing Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the State Department for their role in the carnage, accusing them of violating U.S. law by providing the weapons and support for Israel’s devastating onslaught.
Moor joined a group of Palestinians and their families in filing the lawsuit against the State Department for failing to adhere to a 1997 law. The Leahy Law prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign security forces that are credibly implicated in gross human rights violations.
“I think the lawsuit represents one of the few ways that we can seek to directly hold our government to account for this mass atrocity, which is being perpetrated in Gaza through the active participation of the U.S.,” Moor tells The Independent.
The legal action, which is being supported by rights groups Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), argues that the State Department created a set of “unique, insurmountable processes to evade the Leahy Law requirement to sanction abusive Israeli units, despite overwhelming evidence of their human rights violations.”
The lawsuit represents the first time victims have alleged the government’s “calculated failure” to follow the Leahy Law.
Moor, a writer, was born in Rafah and moved to the U.S. as a child. He has been an active campaigner for Palestinian rights for most of his adult life, and today writes on Palestinian issues from his home in Philadelphia.
But much of his extended family still lives in Gaza and faces a daily battle for survival. His uncle was living in Gaza City when the war started in October last year; he has been displaced with his family seven times since. First they moved to a relative’s house in Khan Younis, until that was bombed. Today they are all living in a camp. His cousin’s son was murdered by a sniper a few weeks ago in Rafah. Another cousin was killed along with his wife and daughter, buried alive in a bombing.
“It’s hard to describe the conditions that people are living in,” Moor says. “Imagine living in a tent. Imagine not having a future, where the struggle for life really is about the next half day or so — can you secure enough to eat? Can you survive the human crush, the indignities of all that?”
His family’s story is common across Gaza. Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble and Israeli jets regularly target so-called safe zones, often killing large numbers of civilians in single strikes.
But despite clear and credible evidence of mass human rights violations by Israel in carrying out the war, the U.S. has continued to send weapons and aid without interruption. The Biden administration has sent more than $17bn in military aid to Israel since October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack in southern Israel that killed hundreds of Israelis.
A United Nations commission found in June that Israel was responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. It said Israeli authorities “are responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or wilful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention and outrages upon personal dignity.”
The lawsuit argues that evidence of Israeli abuses in Gaza were routinely ignored, or worked around by the State Department, which put its ideological commitment to Israel above its obligations under the law.
The Independent’s own reporting, based on leaked documents from the U.S. Agency for International Development and testimony from former State Department officials, found that the U.S. government’s own investigations into possible war crimes committed by Israel were being hamstrung by the Biden administration’s political desire for the support to continue unabated.
“There’s no incentive to investigate if the president and the White House themselves have announced that aid is unconditional,” Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department advising on arms transfers and the laws of war, told The Independent in April. “That means they don’t want to hear inconvenient legal conclusions,” he added.
Moor says he is not under any illusions that the lawsuit will end the war in Gaza, but he does believe it could force future administrations to follow the law.
“The U.S. is a nation of laws. The question of whether we obey the law doesn’t come down to the secretary’s prerogative or the president’s prerogative — you follow the law,” he said.
Beyond that, Moor hopes that it may provide a record of precisely how key figures in the Biden administration worked to shield Israel from U.S. law in order for it to contin carry out the widescale atrocities.
“I’m hopeful that it’s going to contribute to this record of who did what and who participated in what,” he says. “I’m not naive enough to think that there’s going to be kind of a war crimes commission, but I do think that the people who’ve worked hard to destroy Gaza — that’s Joe Biden and Blinken, [White House national security advisor] Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk — they’ve earned this brand, this Scarlett Letter, this genocide, and I hope they carry it for the rest of their lives.”
“Often you hear this word complicity, but I think complicity is the wrong descriptor here,” he adds. “I think the United States, the State Department, the Biden administration has actively participated as a matter of policy and the extermination of Palestinian life in Gaza.”
An investigation from The Independent earlier this year revealed that the Biden administration rejected or ignored pleas to use its leverage to persuade Israel — which has received billions of dollars in U.S. military support — to allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to prevent famine.
Administration officials provided diplomatic cover for Israel to create the conditions for famine by blocking international aid efforts and attempts to alleviate the crisis, making the delivery of aid almost impossible, The Independent found.
In December, a sweeping report from Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, following similar findings by international aid groups tracking allegations of human rights abuses in Gaza.
