Nov. 13, 2023 (SFChronicle.com)
Palestinians and supporters of their rights sued President Joe Biden in San Francisco on Monday, accusing his administration of backing and funding genocide by Israel in Gaza.
The Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, who Israel says killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, has led to a five-week Israeli counterattack. According to Gaza health authorities, Israel’s soldiers and bombers have killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, while cutting off food, water and power to Gaza, and virtually shutting down its health care system.
Those actions — and their U.S. support — fit the legal definition of genocide, conduct “committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” said lawyers representing two Palestinian human rights groups along with individuals, including Bay Area residents, whose family members have been killed.
“This unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support” from Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, attorneys Johnny Sinodis and Marc Van Der Hout said in the federal court lawsuit.
The plaintiffs are seeking injunctions that would require administration officials to “take all measures within their power” to end the bombing of Gaza, lift Israel’s siege of the territory and its evacuation orders for 1.2 million residents of northern Gaza, and stop “obstructing attempts by the international community … to implement a ceasefire.”
It is unclear whether courts would have the power to order the administration to take such actions, as foreign policy decisions are generally within the authority of the executive branch of government rather than the judiciary. But advocates of the suit said the horrors of the current situation justify unprecedented legal action.
“I have done everything in my power,” plaintiff Mohammad Herzallah of Fairfield, who has lost seven family members in the attacks, said in a statement released by his lawyers. “I have participated in protests, sit-ins, wrote letters to my representatives, civil disobedience. Now I am asking the courts to end this ongoing genocide.”
“That’s what the courts are for,” said attorney Van Der Hout. “U.S. courts can order the U.S. government to do what it has to do under the law.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit noted that Biden, after traveling to Israel, promised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Oct. 15 that he would ask Congress for “an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense.”
The U.S. is already providing $3.8 billion a year in military aid to Israel, and Biden’s proposed support package would add $14.1 billion. The same day he promised further funding, the suit said, the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
As evidence of genocide, the suit cited Israel’s bombardment of hospitals in Gaza and cutoffs of power and food supplies, which have caused the deaths of newborns and other patients.
But Israel says its targets were Hamas soldiers. The Israeli government, with support from the Biden administration, contends it has evidence that Hamas fighters have spoken of tunnels they occupied beneath Al-Shifa, one of the territory’s largest hospitals, which is about to shut down.
The suit acknowledged that the Hamas assault that began Oct. 7 violated international law. But “even attacks that result in atrocity crimes can never justify, as a matter of law or morality, the form of lethal collective punishment and destruction against the Palestinian population that is unfolding,” the lawyers told the court.
After Israel began bombing the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, they noted, Craig Mokhiber, a top United Nations human rights official in New York, said he was resigning because of the act of “textbook genocide.” In response, John Kirby, a spokesperson for Biden’s National Security Council, said he did not consider Israel’s actions genocidal and that “now is not the time for a cease-fire.”
The administration had a similar response, the suit said, to U.N. Secretary General António Guterres’ statement at a Nov. 6 news conference that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.”
And when the United States ratified the international Genocide Convention in 1988, the lawyers said, it was through legislation co-sponsored by Delaware’s Democratic senator, Joe Biden.
Reach Bob Egelko: begelko@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @BobEgelko
Written By Bob Egelko
Bob Egelko has been a reporter since June 1970. He spent 30 years with the Associated Press, covering news, politics and occasionally sports in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, and legal affairs in San Francisco from 1984 onward. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner for five months in 2000, then joined The Chronicle in November 2000.
His beat includes state and federal courts in California, the Supreme Court and the State Bar. He has a law degree from McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and is a member of the bar. Coverage has included the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the appointment of Rose Bird to the state Supreme Court and her removal by the voters, the death penalty in California and the battles over gay rights and same-sex marriage.
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