A State Department official resigned Wednesday and has since gone on a media tour blasting President Biden’s “horrific policy” toward Israel, accusing the administration of enabling “a genocide in Gaza.”
Annelle Sheline’s resignation from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is the most significant public departure from the department since last October, when Josh Paul, a senior official in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, announced he was calling it quits.
“For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible,” Sheline, who worked as a foreign affairs officer, wrote in an CNN op-ed announcing her resignation.
“Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.”
Sheline also spoke to the Washington Post and has done interviews with CNN, CNN International and “Democracy Now!” since stepping down.
“I was not planning initially to go public,” she told CNN’s Jim Sciutto Thursday. “I was only at the State Department for a brief time. But when I started to tell people that I was planning to resign quietly, they said, you know, please reconsider, please, please go public if you’d be willing to. So I decided I would.”
“I do think that public pressure is why we’re starting to see the administration shifting here,” she added.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that Sheline left the department after concluding “the first year of a fellowship that could have gone for two years.”
She “did not exercise her option to return for a second year as a fellow,” according to Miller.
“I think everyone can make decisions for themselves about what they’re going to do,” he added. “One of the things I would note, even in the first story that I read about this, the individual in question herself noted that she attends meetings where there are people who have the exact opposite view of hers and express them openly, and that’s what we encourage people to do, and ultimately they have to make decisions about their future employment status.”
Michael Freund, a pro-Israel activist and former adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blasted Sheline for not being more critical of Hamas, the terror group that massacred 1,200 people in the Jewish state last October, igniting the conflict.
“Good riddance to her,” Freund wrote on X.
“In her column she did not utter a single word of criticism for Hamas for the October 7 massacre or for the kidnapping and torture of Israeli children and Holocaust survivors,” he added. “The State Department will be better off without her.”
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza claims at least 32,552 people have been killed in the Palestinian-controlled territory since the war’s onset.
The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and terrorist deaths.
