A LAWSUIT CALLING FOR EVACUATION OF PALESTINIAN AMERICANS IN GAZA WAS DISMISSED BY AN AMERICAN JUDGE

The Judge Said She Had Neither The Ability Nor The Resources To Take On Foreign Policy Decisions. She Also Didn’t Have The Guts To Seek Justice.

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing the American government of failing to rescue Palestinian Americans and their family members trapped in Gaza.

Chief judge Virginia Kendall of the District Court in Chicago expressed sympathy with “the impossible positions in which many of the plaintiffs have found themselves”, but said she did not have the ability and tools to evaluate foreign policy decisions made by the government’s executive branch, Reuters reported.

Kendall said she lacked the diplomatic resources to coordinate the evacuation of plaintiffs and/or their families with other nations, or the ability to rescue people from war zones, especially given the lack of American diplomatic presence in Gaza.

“Endeavoring to answer these questions – and many more like them – from the comfort of chambers is both undoable and would also invade the political branches’ constitutionally committed tasks of determining when, how, and under what circumstances evacuations from war zones should proceed,” Kendall wrote.

A group of nine Palestinian Americans – who were either trapped in Gaza or had relatives there – filed a lawsuit, with support from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) and the law office of Maria Kari, against the Biden administration in December 2024, accusing it of abandoning Americans of Palestinian origin during Israel’s two-year war on the enclave, which has been recognised as a genocide by the United Nations, human rights groups and genocide scholars.

The lawsuit called on the government to conduct emergency rescues of Palestinian Americans in Gaza. Over 71,000 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave, with numbers increasing daily due to Israel’s ceasefire violations.

The plaintiffs say they tried for months to use all non-legal means to either escape Gaza themselves or help their immediate family members escape.

The lawsuit said the American government failed to implement standard efforts to evacuate Americans and their families from Gaza, thereby violating their constitutional rights to equal protection by abandoning them in a war zone and not evacuating them as readily as it would other Americans.

The plaintiffs said that their lives had been turned upside down, and the lack of adequate shelter, food shortages, medical care, and turmoil meant that the government had a duty of care to evacuate them.

According to Cair, each of the plaintiffs is eligible for evacuation by the American regime but has been “summarily ignored by the State Department and other Biden administration officials”.

“The law requires the US government to protect Americans wherever they may be. With every passing day, the danger of our clients dying from Israeli bombardment or the starvation and disease now rampant in Gaza only goes up,” lead attorney Maria Kari said at the time of filing the lawsuit, it was reported.

However, Kendall also said available evidence shows the American government had developed an evacuation plan, and the nine plaintiffs had either been evacuated or rejected offers that did not cover immediate family members.

The American Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the time of that publication.

EVACUATION PROCESS

In February of 2024, it was reported on the labyrinthine process that Palestinian Americans trapped in Gaza must go through to be able to secure a American evacuation.

The first step involves relatives of trapped individuals applying to the State Department on their behalf using an online crisis intake form.

If the State Department approves the form, it adds the individuals’ names to a list that gets sent to Egypt and Israel for further review.

Once the review is approved, the list is sent over to Palestinian authorities in Gaza, which publish a daily list of individuals cleared to leave via the Rafah border crossing.

The State Department said at the time that it had successfully helped more than 1,600 Palestinians – “including US citizens, lawful permanent residents (LPRs) and their family members” – leave Gaza and enter Egypt via the Rafah crossing.

However, the process only helped Palestinian Americans and their families escape if they met very specific criteria.

At the time, only American citizens, their spouses, parents and unmarried children under the age of 21 were permitted by Washington to leave Gaza.

Siblings under the age of 21 could also be approved to leave, but only if their American-citizen sibling was also under 21, according to Sammy Nabulsi, a lawyer working on those cases.

It is still unclear how many of those families stuck in Gaza have been evacuated since the lawsuit was filed and a ceasefire was reached.