Seventeen of Joe Biden’s campaign staff wrote an open letter to the U.S. President, calling for an end to the ‘violence occurring in Gaza.”
“We write to you as the current staff of your re-election campaign. As we work to mobilize voters to cast their ballots for you in 2024, we must take a moment to acknowledge our tremendous grief, and the grief shared by countless other Americans, toward the violence occurring in Gaza,” the campaign staff wrote.
They noted that they joined the campaign to fight for “justice, empathy, and our belief in the dignity of human life,” but have found that the Biden administration’s “response to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing in Gaza has been fundamentally antithetical to those values.”
The authors called for Biden to use “financial and diplomatic leverage to bring about — an immediate, permanent ceasefire.”
They also implored Biden to end “unconditional military aid to Israel” and advocate for the release of Hamas hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
Two other demands included an investigation into “whether Israel’s actions in Gaza violate the Leahy Law, prohibiting U.S. military aid from funding foreign military units implicated in the commission of gross violations of human rights” and taking “concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this conflict.”
“Israel’s attacks in Gaza have had one of the highest civilian death tolls of any conflict in decades. Children have been caught in the center of it, many of them killed by bombs made in St. Charles, MO,” the letter adds. “In the past 88 days, over 1% of the population of Gaza — including countless women, children, and premature babies — have been killed, while almost 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes. There is no safe place for innocent civilians to go, no shelter, and no humanitarian assistance.”
“What we are witnessing in Gaza, as highlighted by countless experts from around the world, is a genocide,” the campaign staff assert.
The authors said it is a “moral and electoral imperative” that Biden calls for a “cessation of violence.”
In November, more than 500 government employees signed a letter calling for President Joe Biden to push a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
The open letter’s signatories came from both senior and low-level positions across the departments of Commerce, Defense, Interior, Homeland Security, and the Executive Office of the President.
“We represent a coalition of Biden-Harris Administration political appointees and civil servants, positioned across the domestic and foreign policy spheres, working in federal agencies, departments, independent agencies, and the White House,” the letter began, according to the New York Times.
“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians; the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services; and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip.”