Education Dept. Official Resigns Over Biden’s Policies on Israel and Gaza

A top adviser at the Education Department has resigned over President Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, the second official to do so as the administration faces divisions over U.S. support for Israel’s bombardment in Gaza.

The adviser, Tariq Habash, who is the department’s only Palestinian American political appointee, announced on Wednesday that he could no longer serve an administration that had “put millions of innocent lives in danger.”

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Habash said he had come to the decision after feeling “no empathy and no recognition of my own humanity by the president.”

“I care about helping people,” said Mr. Habash, who was born in the United States but is the descendant of Palestinian Christians who were expelled from Jaffa in 1948, when the Israeli state was established. “I thought the president did, too.”

In his Jan. 3 resignation letter, addressed to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Mr. Habash said he could no longer serve an administration that had “put millions of innocent lives in danger.”

“It should go without saying that all violence against innocent people is horrific. I mourn each and every loss, Israeli and Palestinian,” Mr. Habash wrote in the letter. “But I cannot represent an administration that does not value all human life equally.”