Michael Arria
Mondoweiss / February 5, 2026
A new Reuters report sheds more light on the Biden administration’s role in covering up and enabling the Gaza genocide.
Reuters reports that the Biden administration blocked a series of memos detailing Israel’s horrific destruction of Gaza.
Staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development attempted to warn the White House of the situation in a February 2024 cable that described Northern Gaza as an “apocalyptic nightmare.”
The staffers said they saw human bones on the roads, dead bodies in abandoned cars, and witnessed “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.”
According to interviews with four former officials and documents seen by Reuters, U.S. Ambassador to Jerusalem, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the memos from further circulation within the U.S. government because they allegedly lacked balance.
The cables did catch the attention of multiple Biden officials, including deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, “but senior U.S. officials were not receiving regular first-hand accounts because of restricted access to the area during an intense battle between Israel and Hamas.”
“Simply put, humanitarian expertise was repeatedly sidelined, blocked, ignored,” a former member of USAID’s Middle East disaster response team told Reuters.
The reporting shines further light on the Biden administration’s role in the Gaza genocide.
“In any just international legal system, officials who knowingly conceal evidence of genocide to enable its continuation would be investigated as war criminals,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIR’s National Deputy Director, in a statement. “Based on the facts as reported, Jack Lew and Stephanie Hallett did not merely fail in their duties, they allegedly used their power to suppress life-saving information, helping turn Gaza into a graveyard.”
“No official is above the law,” Mitchell said. “History will record not only who dropped the bombs, but who silenced the warnings. Neither Lew nor Hallett, or similarly implicated individuals such as Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, should have any role in guiding our nation’s foreign policy in the future.”
Last August, Jack Lew was interviewed by the New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner, where he justified the killing of Palestinian children.
Here’s that exchange:
Lew: The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.
Chotiner: Sorry, what did you just say?
Lew: In many cases, the original number of casualties—
Chotiner: No, I meant the thing about who the children were.
Lew: They were often the children of the fighters themselves.
Chotiner: And therefore what follows from that?
Lew: What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.
Chotiner: Hold on, Mr. Secretary. That’s not, in fact, correct, right? Whether it’s a legitimate target has to do with all kinds of things like proportionality. It doesn’t matter if the kids are the kids of—
Lew: If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there. If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different. I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.
Chotiner: It may shine a very poor light on Hamas, but who the kids are does not make a difference in terms of international law.
Lew: It is not the simple question that it originally appears to be when the initial report makes it sound like the target was just an empty school that families took cover in. In some cases, I’m not aware of the full explanations, because when I left we were still asking questions to get more detail, and saying to them that they have to be able to explain these things. And I’m not going to say that none of them fall outside of the bounds of things where there should be disciplinary action against some of the officers involved. I don’t know the answer to that.
Schumer
Polling shows that 92% of Democratic voters believe ICE efforts have gone too far, which sure sounds like a slam dunk issue in terms of combating Trump. However, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is predictably squandering this political capital.
In The American Prospect, David Dayen says that the caucus’s recent list of immigration asks does actually demand that much.
“Ideas like requiring cooperation with state and local investigations into ICE and CBP misconduct, returning CBP personnel to the border rather than interior enforcement, preventing enforcement in ‘sensitive locations’ like schools or churches, and ending mass quotas for immigration arrests are not present in the Schumer list,” writes Dayen. “And Schumer also doesn’t touch funding levels, nor does he attempt to claw back the surge funding for ICE that enables operations like those we’re seeing in Minnesota.”
While Schumer pulls his punches on ICE, he hasn’t moderated his position on Israel and the United States government’s continued military support.
In remarks to a recent meeting of Jewish leaders, Schumer told the crowd that he has many jobs and that “one is to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs.”
“As long as I’m in the Senate, this program will continue to grow from strength to strength, and we won’t let anyone attack it or undo it,” Schumer declared.
“We delivered more security assistance to Israel, our ally, under my leadership than ever, ever before,” he added. “We will keep doing that.”
“Schumer’s comments on Israel came just eight days after a Customs and Border Protection agent and a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, and amidst near-daily news of violence and horrific deportations by immigration agents, who have been likened to the Gestapo by critics,” noted Truthout.
Michael Arria is Mondoweiss’ U.S. correspondent
