What he didn’t anticipate was becoming a key witness to what he describes as a systematic failure of US foreign policy.
“The more informed you become on this issue, you can’t avoid realizing how bad it is,” Casey told the Guardian.
Casey resigned from the state department in July after four years at the job, discreetly leaving the post unlike other recent high-profile government departures. Now seated at his kitchen table in the quiet suburbs of northern Michigan, Casey reflected on how, as one of only two people in the entire US government explicitly focused on Gaza, he became an unwilling chronicler of a humanitarian catastrophe.
“I got so tired of writing about dead kids,” he said. “Just constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”
Casey’s work function included documenting the humanitarian and political landscape through classified cables, research and reporting. But his disillusionment wasn’t sudden. It was a slow accumulation of bureaucratic betrayals – each report dismissed, each humanitarian concern bulldozed by political expediency.
Casey said he and his colleagues developed comprehensive strategies for Gaza’s reconstruction, only to have them systematically rejected. “We outlined three key angles,” he explained. “Humanitarian aid, security infrastructure and governance. We outlined connecting Gaza with the West Bank, pushing for Palestinian Authority to assert its control in Gaza at the gubernatorial and ministerial levels, and the needs for elections at some point.”
But each proposal, whether through reports or meetings in Washington, met the same response: “Every idea we came up with, [the Biden administration] would just say, ‘Well, the Israelis have another idea.’”
Those Israeli proposals – which included having local clans run Gaza – struck him as not just impractical, but deliberately destructive.
“We wrote numerous reports and cables explaining why this wouldn’t work,” he said. “It’s not in our interest to have warlords running Gaza.”
An internal job description obtained by the Guardian confirmed Casey’s role, noting that he was the “lead political reporting officer on internal politics and security issues in the Gaza Strip and on Palestinian reconciliation issues”.
