U.S. rights groups have filed an appeal against U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for their complicity in the Israeli regime’s months-long genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York civil liberties group, filed an appeal on Monday on behalf of the Palestinian human rights organizations Al-Haq and Defense for Children International as well as Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinian Americans in the United States.
In their appeal at the Ninth District Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the plaintiffs’ lawyers asserted that Biden, Blinken and Austin were complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has left more than 37,000 Palestinian people killed since October.
The original lawsuit filed in November in federal court was dismissed in January on jurisdictional grounds.
One of the Palestinian plaintiffs in the case, who has lost five members of her family in the Israeli regime forces brutal atrocities, said she had vowed to seek justice. “I promised my surviving family members in Gaza that I would do everything in my power to advocate on their behalf,” said Laila El-Haddad.
Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan has sought an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his minister of military affairs, Yoav Gallant, over the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the regime forces in the occupied territory in past months.
Khan announced last month he had reasonable grounds to believe that the Israeli prime minister and his military chief “bear criminal responsibility” for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the besieged Palestinian territory. Their war crimes included ordering targeted attacks on the Palestinian civilians and their starvation due to the Israelis months-long blockade of water and food to the people trapped in the region.
The ICC prosecutor’s decision was rejected by Israel’s backers in the West. Biden, Blinken, Austin and other Western leaders opposed the ICC prosecutors’ demand for arrest warrants for the war-mongering Zionist leaders.
