State Dept Official Resigns Over 'Falsified' Report Claiming Israel Not Blocking Aid to Gaza

“I come before you, not only as the U.S. Secretary of State, but also as a Jew. My grandfather…fled pogroms... My stepfather…survived concentration camps. So...I understand...the harrowing echoes that Hamas’ massacres carry...for Jews everywhere.”

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The state department falsified a report earlier this month to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza, overruling the advice of its own experts, according to a former senior US official who resigned this week.

Stacy Gilbert left her post as senior civil military adviser in the state department's bureau of population, refugees and migration, on Tuesday. She had been one of the department's subject matter experts who drafted the report mandated under national security memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and published on 10 May.

The NSM-20 report found that it was "reasonable to assess" that Israel had used US weapons in a way that was "inconsistent" with international humanitarian law, but that there was not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations.

Even more controversially, the report said the state department did not "currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance" in Gaza.

It was a high-stakes judgment because under a clause in the Foreign Assistance Act, the US would be obliged to cut arms sales and security assistance to any country found to have blocked delivery of US aid.

Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the state department who has worked in several war zones, said that report's conclusion went against the overwhelming view of state department experts who were consulted on the report.

[...] Gilbert was one of the experts consulted in drawing up the NSM-20 report, but she said it was taken out of their hands as it approached completion.

"Sometime at the end of April, the subject matter experts were taken off the report and we were told it would be edited at a higher level. So I did not know what was in the report until it came out," she said. "But when the report came out, late on the Friday afternoon [on 10 May], I read it and I had to reread it. I had to go back and print out that section and read it, because I could not believe it stated so starkly that we assess that Israel is not blocking humanitarian assistance.

"Two hours after it was released, I sent an email to my front office and the team that is working on this, saying I will resign as a result of this," Gilbert said.

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