Claim U.S. Complicity with Israel in Mass Murder, Causing Famine, Ethnic Cleansing, Health Care Destruction

“The U.S. government cannot continue funding and enabling the atrocities in Gaza with impunity. This historic legal action sends a clear message: taxpayers refuse to be complicit in war crimes and genocide. We will use every lawful means to demand accountability and to uphold the fundamental human rights that our nation claims to stand for.”– Afaf Nasher, Esq, CAIR-NY Executive Director

On October 7, 2025, Taxpayers Against Genocide (TAG), the National Lawyers Guild International Committee (NLG), and Palestinian-American petitioners filed an amended and expanded international legal complaint against the U.S. government for participation in the genocide in Gaza. The complaint was filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the official human rights body in the Western Hemisphere established by the Organization of American States (OAS). This is the only legal complaint in the world that directly takes on the U.S. government– including both the Biden and Trump Administrations, as well as Congress– for its role in the genocide.

TAG is a growing grassroots movement that includes more than 4,000 taxpayers across the United States backing this legal action. The NLG legal team filing the complaint is led by Huwaida Arraf, a renowned Palestinian-American human rights attorney and co-founder of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Her co-counsel Maria Kari is also a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team, as well as executive director of Project TAHA. Huwaida Arraf explains the filing of this historic complaint:

We’re bringing this case before the Inter-American Commission because the United States has effectively shielded itself from any kind of accountability for its international crimes, including genocide, in its domestic courts. This case isn’t just about Gaza. It’s about whether our government can force us to be complicit in genocide without consequence. We are not making a mere moral appeal. We are invoking binding legal principles that the United States has pledged to uphold. The duty to prevent genocide is immediate, non-derogable, and universal. It is not suspended for allies, and it cannot be sacrificed to politics.

Maria Kari adds:

Immediately after October 2023, it became clear that the U.S. government would continue its longstanding tradition of complicity in Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people. Even after a U.S. federal court said that Israel’s conduct “plausibly” constitutes genocide and implored the Biden administration to examine its “unflagging support” for Israel’s siege against the Palestinians in Gaza, President Biden doubled down, feeding and fueling genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

The Trump administration inherited the previous administration’s complicity and only escalated it. Through initiatives like the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the U.S. government has crossed the threshold from enabling Israeli war crimes in Gaza to actively partnering in them.

We are now marching hand-in-hand with Israel towards the deliberate erasure of the Palestinian people. Every U.S. taxpayer dollar we send to Israel is a moral stain and a legal liability. This petition demands that we halt this march towards the annihilation of Gazans and confront the United States’ direct role in sustaining Israel’s genocide.

The Palestinian-American petitioners include, among others: Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian-American human rights activist, best selling author, with eyewitness experience in Gaza; Monadel Herzallah, Palestinian-American activist and co-founder of US Palestinian Community Network who has lost 44 family members to the genocide; Hadil El Wahidy, Palestinian-American business owner, community leader, and activist who has lost more than 100 family members to the genocide; and Tarik Kanaana, a Palestinian-American activist in Northern California and co-founder of TAG. In a NYC press conference convened by CAIR-NY, TAG, and the NLG on September 4, 2025, announcing the upcoming filing of the complaint, Hadil El Wahidy declared:

I am a Muslim Palestinian-American woman living in New York with my husband and four children. Since October 7, 2023, over 100 members of my family have been killed in Gaza. We are not just statistics– we are professionals, scholars, children, and community leaders. Yet we are constantly dehumanized. Despite being a taxpayer and US citizen, I feel betrayed by the continuing funding of a genocide, that has devastated my family.

Monadel Herzallah commented on his own personal involvement in the complaint:

I joined this complaint because the United States government needs to be held accountable for its aiding and abetting a genocide. Nothing is going to bring back the 44 family members we lost, but we can give them the justice they deserve by holding their murderers accountable for their crimes. And as a US citizen and tax payer, I am disgusted by the use of my money to kill children instead of improving the lives of my fellow Americans here at home.

Susan Abulhawa said why she is one of the leading petitioners:

This genocide is not only carried out with American weapons– it is carried out in America’s name, with our tax dollars, by politicians who trade Palestinian blood and anguish for campaign checks, political favor, and defense contracts. This is why we bring this lawsuit. Not because the courts are pure, but because even the halls of power must, at times, be forced to look at the blood on their own hands. This is not just a legal claim– it is a moral indictment. It is a demand that those who profit from unfathomable death and horror be made to face the masses.

In Tarik Kanaana’s words:

Over the course of this genocide, I have witnessed the systematic destruction of my history, heritage and parts of the beautiful culture of which I am a product. I have witnessed the bombing of hospitals and schools, churches, mosques, playgrounds, museums, cultural centers, libraries, and seaside promenades… I have seen the desecration of burial grounds and have seen the remains of forebears being unearthed, erasing our history on the land so that refugees have nothing to return to. Israel, with the full support and protection of the U.S., has been destroying anything and everything that sustains life or connects us, the Palestinian people, to our homeland and our history.

One of the public figures endorsing the complaint is Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. Green Beret, a former contractor in Gaza, and an eyewitness to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “death traps”. In the same press conference, he stated:

Direct U.S. government participation and funding in the Gaza Humanitarian Fund as a militarized outsourced aid model, that weaponizes hunger to control and forcibly displace civilians in Gaza, makes the U.S. a party to the conflict in Gaza under international law, and U.S. personnel assisting forces who commit war crimes should face prosecution.

On May 14, 2025, TAG and the NLG filed the first version of the complaint**.** Since then, thousands of US taxpayers have officially joined TAG to endorse the complaint. Over the summer, the legal team amended the complaint to provide expansive additional evidence of the US role in the escalating starvation in Gaza, especially in establishing with the Israeli military the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “death traps”, and to include additional Palestinian-American petitioners. The amended complaint also includes evidence of the illegal sanctions issued by the Trump Adninistration against UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and Palestinian human rights organizations for their efforts to halt the genocide.

The legal complaint calls for “precautionary measures” to fast track the process by which it is adjudicated by the IACHR Commissioners in light of the urgency of the situation. Although the IACHR cannot criminally prosecute US officials, it can find the US government guilty of violating its international obligations under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, adopted in 1948 at the Ninth International Conference of American States. The Declaration established the jurisprudence of the IACHR and the binding human rights requirements to which OAS member states must adhere, including the US government. A finding of guilt of the US government by the IACHR can be leveraged by human rights advocates in their other efforts to hold the US government accountable on an international level.

The legal complaint is endorsed by a wide range of organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Black Alliance for Peace, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Global Exchange, and CODEPINK, as well as by publicly prominent individuals such as Mahmoud Khalil, Dr. Jill Stein, and Dr. Cornel West.

TAG formed one year ago, in September 2024, when activists in counties throughout northern California united to launch a historic class action lawsuit against their Congresspersons for illegally using their tax dollars to fund the genocide in Palestine. This class action quickly grew to more than 1500 taxpayers, across the 18 different counties under the jurisdiction of the US District Court for the Northern District of California. On February 10, 2025, Federal District Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs were posing a “non-justiciable political question” to the Court. This was the same reasoning used to dismiss the previous lawsuit against the Biden Administration by Palestinian-Americans, Defense for Children International- Palestine et al v. Biden et al. It was also the same reasoning used to dismiss Corrie et al v. Caterpillar Inc. These rulings demonstrated the consistent failure of the US court system to uphold the Constitution, federal laws, and international law when it comes to US participation in war crimes and genocide.

Click here for quotes by the legal team, petitioners and victims, and civil society leaders endorsing this historic legal complaint.

For more information and to join the movement, go to www.taxpayersagainstgenocide.org

The post Outraged Taxpayers Charge U.S. Government Over Gaza Genocide at Inter-American Commission– appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed