“I’m tired of writing about dead children”: The Guardian.. Why did a US State Department employee resign over Israel’s policy towards Gaza?

When Mike Casey arrived in Jerusalem in 2020, he wasn’t looking for a fight. An Iraq veteran who had served at the State Department for more than a decade in various posts across Asia, he came with the measured optimism of a career diplomat—two years of Arabic language training, a possible change in administration, and a chance to make a difference. He eventually worked his way up the ranks to become the State Department’s deputy policy adviser on Gaza.

But what he did not expect, according to a report in The Guardian, was to become a prime witness to what he described as the systemic failure of American foreign policy. “The more you learn about this issue, the more you cannot help but realize how bad it is,” Casey told the newspaper.

In July, Casey resigned from the State Department after four years on the job, leaving the post discreetly in a departure that is unlike recent high-level departures of government figures. Now, sitting at his kitchen table in a quiet suburb of northern Michigan, Casey reflects on how, as one of only two people in the entire U.S. government who explicitly focuses on Gaza, he has become an unwilling chronicler of a humanitarian disaster.

“I got tired of writing about dead children,” Casey says. “I had to constantly prove to Washington that these children were really dead and then watch nothing happen.”

Casey’s job was to document the human and political landscape through secret cables, research, and reports. But his disillusionment was not sudden. It was the result of a slow accumulation of bureaucratic betrayals—every report was rejected, every human interest was undermined by political interests.

“We used to write daily reports on Gaza,” he said, and his colleagues would joke with him that they could attach sums of money to the reports but no one would read them.

According to the latest UN figures, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, 90 percent of the population has been displaced, and they face catastrophic humanitarian conditions teetering on the brink of famine. Despite international legal interventions—including an order by the International Court of Justice to halt military operations in Rafah earlier this year, and the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of Israeli leaders for war crimes—the conflict continues unabated, with humanitarian aid barely averting a complete collapse.

After months of aerial bombardment and subsequent ground invasion of the Gaza Strip following Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, post-war planning meetings have become a particular source of frustration.

Casey said he and his colleagues had developed comprehensive strategies for rebuilding Gaza, but they were systematically rejected. “We identified three main pillars: humanitarian assistance, security infrastructure, and governance,” he said. “We identified linking Gaza to the West Bank, pushing the Palestinian Authority to assert control over Gaza at the provincial and ministerial levels, and the need for elections at some point.”

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

The Israeli proposals—which included allowing local clans to run Gaza—seemed to him not only impractical but deliberately destructive. “We wrote many reports and cables explaining why this plan would not work,” he said. “It is not in our interest to have warlords running Gaza.”

A confidential job description obtained by the Guardian confirmed Casey's role, stating that he was "the lead political reporting officer on domestic policy, security issues in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian reconciliation issues".

"The officer leads the mission's inter-agency efforts on Gaza, and provides support for economic issues in Gaza," he added.

The Office of Palestinian Affairs was formally established in 2022 and was intended to be the cornerstone of U.S. engagement, outreach, policy, and analysis when it comes to the Palestinian Authority and the territories, and includes dozens of Americans and about 75 local staff.

Its roots lie in the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem, which merged with the U.S. Embassy when President Donald Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel in 2019.

But its influence has been overshadowed by the broader State Department response during the conflict, which has taken the lead on high-level diplomatic efforts such as de-escalation, negotiations, security coordination with Israel, and engagement with other regional and international allies. The National Security Council also plays a pivotal role in developing and implementing U.S. policy while advising the president, along with the Pentagon, on providing military assistance to Israel.

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

A particularly disturbing moment came as the war neared its start, when Joe Biden publicly disputed the casualty figures—estimated at 8,300 dead in less than a month—that Casey had documented himself. “I was the one reporting,” he says, wondering, “what was the point of me writing these things if you were going to ignore them?”

Some Middle East analysts see the administration’s approach that led to the resignations as exceptionally dysfunctional in its stagnation. “We’ve been meeting to talk about a cease-fire for months,” says Khaled Elgindy, director of the Middle East Institute’s Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs Program, who frequently meets with and advises administration officials. “What struck me was how little they actually moved. Every time we saw them, it was astonishing. There was no real movement at all.”

For others, the administration’s own metrics have become an indictment of its approach. Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., noted that the handling of humanitarian aid has reached “a low that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”

He described a deliberate strategy in which the administration was “deliberately using the tool of humanitarian aid as a way to buy time and ease tensions among its base to show that it was trying to do something.”

In October, the United States issued a 30-day ultimatum to Israel, demanding in a leaked letter that at least 350 trucks of humanitarian aid be allowed into Gaza. Despite explicit requests and aid levels falling below set benchmarks, the Biden administration has made clear that it will not curtail arms sales when the deadline expires, seeing only limited progress.

The latest data from Mercy Corps and other relief agencies indicates that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues to deteriorate below basic humanitarian needs levels, with only 65 aid trucks now entering Gaza daily – down from a pre-war average of 500.

Away from diplomacy, Casey now works at a local bank, where he observes from afar and his criticisms extend beyond one administration. He sees a systemic failure in American policy toward the Palestinians—a complete lack of a coherent strategy, which in turn hurts the Israelis as well and remains deeply personal.

What is his final assessment? Casey says, “We don’t have a specific policy on Palestine. We just do what the Israelis want us to do.