Washington’s public rejection of proposals to remove Palestinians from Gaza comes as former State Department spokesperson Hala Rharrit describes the warnings she delivered from inside the Biden administration and demands accountability from those who kept its policy in place.
The United States has publicly rejected Israeli calls to remove Palestinians from Gaza, setting out an official position that stands against proposals advanced by senior members of Israel’s government. The declaration comes as Hala Rharrit, the American diplomat who resigned rather than defend Washington’s Gaza policy to Arab audiences, describes how warnings from inside the State Department failed to change an approach she believes made Palestinian lives expendable.
On 4 September 2026, the State Department rejected forced displacement after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz described removing Gaza’s population as the only solution, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoing him the following day. Washington cited Point 12 of President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, which promises that residents may remain and that those choosing to leave can return.
The statement establishes a public disagreement over Gaza’s future. Rharrit’s testimony raises the closely related question of whether American expressions of concern are matched by decisions capable of changing what happens to Palestinians.
Rharrit, who resigned in April 2024 after 18 years in the diplomatic service, describes a department that initially welcomed her reports about civilian suffering and growing anger towards the United States, then stopped requiring them as the policy remained unchanged.
“I am grateful every single day when I wake up that I resigned, that I’m free,” she said. “Nothing, nothing for me is worth me selling my soul.”
Katz’s remarks underline why the question of American restraint remains immediate. Speaking at a conference on 2 September, he claimed that Trump had merely “frozen” the population removal proposal and said Israel was prepared to arrange departures by sea and air if other countries would receive Palestinians.
“There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration,” Katz said.
He also claimed, without identifying the surveys, that 80 per cent of Gaza’s residents wanted to emigrate. That assertion leaves a fundamental question unresolved: how meaningful is a decision to leave when people are trying to survive the destruction of their homes and communities? A promise that departure will be voluntary needs to be considered alongside the conditions in which that choice would be made, and whether remaining or returning is a practical possibility.
For Rharrit, the distance between official language and lived experience was precisely what made her position untenable.
An Arab American of Moroccan heritage, she entered diplomacy believing she could help bridge the relationship between the United States and the Arab world. She had studied at George Washington University and Georgetown, and regarded her opposition to seemingly endless wars as a reason to join the diplomatic service. She wanted to be in the rooms where alternatives could be proposed.
“I basically gave my entire adult life to diplomacy,” she said. “I still believe in diplomacy. I actually believe diplomacy is the only way forward.”
She added: “True diplomacy, not diplomacy as a cover for war, which is basically how the State Department was being used.”
Throughout most of her career, she believed her contribution mattered even when she disagreed with a policy. Work across postings that included Hong Kong, South Africa and the Arab world gave her experience she felt could improve decisions from within. Gaza shattered that confidence. She repeatedly described Israel’s actions as genocide and argued that American support implicated Washington in it.
As the State Department’s Arabic language spokesperson, she was expected to deliver the same approved messages that audiences heard from Matthew Miller at the podium in Washington. She had already given more than 100 interviews on different subjects, she said, but refused interviews on Gaza because the talking points failed to address what Arab audiences were seeing.
“Where is the mention of Palestinian loss of life?” she recalled asking. “Where’s the mention of the attack on this hospital? Where’s the mention of the attack on this school?”
Her objection was both moral and professional. A message that inadequately acknowledged Palestinian suffering would deepen hostility towards the United States and undermine the purpose of public diplomacy, she argued.
“This will make people hate America, not love America,” she recalled telling colleagues. “These talking points are not going to be strategically successful.”
Instead, Rharrit began sending informal feedback about coverage of Gaza and reactions to American policy. She wanted to establish whether officials in Washington were confronting the same material that Arab audiences were watching every day.
“Are you guys seeing what I’m seeing? Washington, are you there? Are you seeing these images?”
That work became a formal assignment from the Bureau of Global Public Affairs: daily snapshots of reporting across Arab television and social media, including how the United States was being portrayed. She said the reports went to an interagency task force and senior officials, and that she received feedback that material had been forwarded to the secretary of state’s office.
Initially, colleagues encouraged her to retain the disturbing photographs and videos because they helped convey the scale of the catastrophe. She also submitted classified cables and continued raising concerns through other channels.
“I did everything that I possibly could,” she said.
Her account challenges any suggestion that Washington lacked warnings from its own personnel. She says her reports documented both Palestinian suffering and the consequences of American support for Israel, in an effort to force that reality into policy discussions.
Selecting the images exacted a personal cost. Rharrit described reviewing footage day after day, choosing material that was both widely circulated and difficult to ignore. Images of children were especially devastating to her as a mother, and she became emotional while recalling the experience.
“These are human beings. These are mothers. These are fathers. These are daughters. These are sons,” she said. “Normal people getting killed by American bombs.”
“I would be in my office speaking to colleagues and I would just cry,” she recalled. “Why aren’t you crying when you see these images?”
The response she remembered was that colleagues had to do their jobs. For her, that appeal to professional duty had become an explanation for institutional passivity in the face of atrocity. She described becoming increasingly unable to reconcile the department’s work with the values she believed she had been recruited to uphold.
“No matter what I send, no matter what anybody sends, the status quo was going to remain,” she said.
The decisive moment came in January 2024, when, she said, the Bureau of Global Public Affairs told her that the daily snapshots were no longer required. Pressure to give interviews had continued, but her attempts to change the policy had reached what she believed was a limit.
Rharrit interpreted the ending of the reports as the sidelining of unwelcome information. She also saw the record she had assembled as evidence of what the administration knew, creating a trail against which later explanations could be tested.
“We’ve got the receipts,” she said. “We know exactly what you knew when you knew it.”
That challenge shaped her response to expressions of regret by former Biden officials. Former national security adviser Jake Sullivan has acknowledged that Washington should have put more pressure on Israel. Accounts of Antony Blinken’s alarm at the destruction, and Miller’s subsequent acknowledgement that war crimes had occurred, provided further examples of the distance between officials’ public positions while in office and their later reflections.
Rharrit rejected those reflections as an adequate reckoning with the authority the officials had held and the decisions they had made.
“They’re so disgusting,” she said. “It’s just so despicable in every way, shape, or form that those individuals, particularly Jake Sullivan and a handful of others, actually had the power to save human lives.”
“They actually had the power to stop unconditional arms assistance to Israel,” she continued. “The Israelis were not killing the Palestinians by themselves. The Israelis were killing the Palestinians with American bombs, with American jets, with American everything.”
She argued that their later statements were designed to repair reputations as public attitudes towards American support for Israel changed.
“They’re doing a PR game. This is just pure PR where they’re trying to make themselves look good.”
Her assessment of their motives is part of a broader demand that their accounts be tested against the warnings they received and the choices available to them. For Rharrit, leaving government was an act of fidelity to her responsibilities as an American official.
“When I became a diplomat, I swore to defend the Constitution, to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” she said. “That is exactly what I did. That is exactly why I resigned.”
At the time of her resignation, the State Department pointed to the channels available for employees to express disagreement with government policy. Their existence leaves open the question Rharrit raises about how effectively objections are heard when they conflict with an administration’s established course.
Her argument also extends to the legal rules governing military assistance. She said evidence of serious abuses should have triggered restrictions under the Leahy laws. The State Department provision prohibits assistance to foreign security force units when the secretary has credible information that they committed gross human rights violations, subject to a specified accountability exception. Its application depends on the units involved and the evidence concerning them.
The Gaza aid pier became another example of what she regarded as the substitution of a highly visible initiative for effective pressure. Announced by Biden in March 2024, the project was presented as a way to get humanitarian supplies into Gaza by sea. Rharrit recalled being urged to speak publicly about it because it offered a positive story about American assistance, even while she questioned the approach amid restrictions on land access.
She resisted the suggestion that a spokesperson’s responsibility was simply to repeat the approved message.
“We were hired for our intellect. We were hired for a critical analysis and that’s what I’m here for,” she said.
A subsequent official evaluation recorded an estimated cost of $230 million and found that weather, insecurity and access constraints impaired aid distribution. It also found that American and Israeli military requirements took precedence over expressed humanitarian needs during planning. Those findings document serious problems with the project, while Rharrit’s further allegation that enriching contractors was its purpose remains her assessment.
She described the pier as part of a wider effort to manage perceptions without resolving the policies causing public anger. Her explanation combined commercial interests, ideological commitment to Israel and racism that, she argued, allowed Palestinian lives to be treated as less valuable.
“There’s too much profit in war,” she said, describing an establishment extending across government, lobbying, defence companies and think tanks. “I also do think that for some, including Biden, it was ideological.”
She also challenged colleagues who privately expressed discomfort but declined to speak out because of mortgages, careers or other personal obligations. She understood those pressures, she said, because she shared them. What she rejected was the assumption that keeping quiet provided lasting protection from the consequences of destructive policy.
“Keeping your head down doesn’t save you. It just makes sure that injustice continues to spread.”
Her most stark account of official complacency concerned a meeting after her resignation. Rharrit said she returned to Washington and spoke with a very senior State Department official, warning that hostility towards the United States across the Arab world was becoming dangerous. She argued that American support for Israel was damaging US interests and putting Americans at risk.
According to her recollection, the official replied: “They got over Iraq. They’ll get over this, too.”
She did not identify the official, and the exchange remains her account of a private conversation. She presented it as an illustration of an attitude that treated public anger over mass suffering as something Washington could simply outlast.
Her demand for accountability follows from that concern about repetition. She singled out Brett McGurk’s service across administrations and his involvement in policy on Iraq and Gaza as an example of the continuity she wanted scrutinised. She questioned how officials associated with disastrous outcomes could retain influence and move into prestigious roles after leaving government.
“I’m not satisfied with them just not getting into the next administration. I want accountability,” she said. “It’s to make sure none of this happens again.”
Rharrit said she was working with others to prevent former Biden officials responsible for Gaza policy from returning to power, while pursuing broader accountability efforts with contacts in the United States and Europe. She gave few details, but made clear that she wanted consequences extending beyond criticism of their record.
The political consequences of Gaza were central to her argument as well. She said she could not bring herself to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and believed the issue contributed decisively to the Democrats’ defeat. Her interpretation reflects a wider conviction that American voters’ relationship with Washington’s support for Israel is changing.
She connected her criticism of Gaza policy with the later war on Iran, arguing that both reflected the erosion of diplomacy and a willingness to explain military action while marginalising those suffering its consequences. Having left government in 2024, she was assessing the Trump administration’s decisions from outside it.
“I think American diplomacy got killed in Gaza and has been buried by the Iran war,” she said.
Yet her assessment of American credibility coexisted with a continued belief in negotiation and cooperation. Rharrit described plans to use her government experience to help organisations working on community welfare, sustainable food, water and environmental protection. She wanted to give them access and an understanding of government comparable to what former officials routinely bring to corporate clients.
“I’m going to help them outmaneuver those entrenched systems of injustice,” she said. Her longer term goal was to connect those initiatives so they could exercise greater influence together.
That ambition returns to the reason she said she entered public service: the belief that her knowledge and voice could help prevent harm. What changed was her conclusion about where she could act effectively.
“Your safety is connected to my safety. Really, I can’t be safe unless you’re safe,” she said.
The latest dispute over Gaza’s population places that question before Washington again. Katz has described removal as an option awaiting permission; the State Department has publicly rejected forced displacement. Those positions have different implications for Palestinians trying to secure a future in their homeland.
Rharrit’s testimony offers a practical way to assess the American response: examine what officials do with warnings, what conditions they attach to support, and whether their decisions protect the people invoked in their statements. Her account of the Biden years is a demand to scrutinise the record behind the assurances.
For Palestinians, the consequence is immediate. The value of Washington’s rejection of expulsion will be measured in whether people can remain in Gaza, rebuild their lives and return if they leave. That is the distance between a diplomatic position and a protection that can be relied upon.
Sources and credits
The principal sources for this feature are Ali Harb’s Al Jazeera report, US rejects Israeli suggestions of removing Palestinians from Gaza, published on 4 September 2026, and Mohamed Hashem’s Middle East Eye Real Talk interview, She was asked to defend America’s Gaza policy to Arabs. She quit instead, published on YouTube on 31 August 2026. Rharrit’s direct quotations are drawn from the supplied transcript, which also contains the discussion of Sullivan, Blinken and Miller.
Additional reporting on Katz’s remarks: Nava Freiberg and Emanuel Fabian, The Times of Israel, Katz on plans to facilitate emigration from Gaza, 2 September 2026. Resignation date and the State Department’s response: Reuters, US State Department Arabic spokesperson resigns in opposition to Gaza policy, 25 April 2024.
Legal and oversight references: 22 USC 2378d on assistance to foreign security force units; USAID Office of Inspector General, USAID’s Gaza Response and the JLOTS Maritime Corridor, 27 August 2024.
