Taxpayers Against Genocide (TAG) filed a petition in May to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights requesting that it investigate the United States for its material support of Israel’s war crimes and that it order the U.S. to immediately halt all military aid and weapons transfers to Israel. The grassroots group submitted the petition on behalf of Palestinian Americans with family and close ties to Gaza and other U.S. taxpayers opposed to Washington’s use of public funds to support genocide and crimes against the Palestinians. IACHR is a principle and autonomous organ of the Organization of American States whose mission is to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere.

At a Sept. 4 press conference at Foley Square in Manhattan, TAG announced that it is amending the complaint to include additional evidence about the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israel set up GHF in late May with U.S. sponsorship. Its four “aid” sites are surrounded by tanks and Israel Occupation Forces snipers who have killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians trying to get food.

Lead plaintiff Susan Abulhawa, a renowned Palestinian author, poet and human rights advocate, said the lawsuit was brought as a moral indictment: “It is a demand that those who profit from the unfathomable death and horror be made to face the masses. We must use every available tool even if it is only to carve into the record that not everyone was complicit, that not everyone sold their soul for comfort. We can expose the machinery of this genocide for what it is, a system of profit and domination where Palestinian lives are expendable and our silence is the currency of the powerful.”

In a statement read at the press conference, lead counsel Huwaida Arraf said the petition to the international court presents overwhelming evidence that the U.S. government is violating its binding obligations under international law by materially supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. She said, “It is about real people, families, parents, grandparents, children, babies being systematically bombed, starved and annihilated before the eyes of the world with weapons, money and political cover provided by our government.” 

Hadil El Wahidy, a Palestinian-American woman living in New York City and a petitioner, reported that since October 7, 2023, over 100 members of her family have been killed in Gaza and many others have been displaced or imprisoned without trial. “Those who have survived live in fear and extreme hardship,” she said.

Monadel Herzallah, another Palestinian-American petitioner and a public schoolteacher in California, said he has lost 44 family members in Israeli military assaults.

U.S. paying for concentration camp construction

Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. Green Beret and a former contractor in Gaza who witnessed the shooting of Palestinians at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution centers, reported that U.S. tax dollars are currently going to the building of a “2.7 kilometer-area concentration camp” in Southern Gaza without running water and electricity to which Palestinians will be forcefully moved. 

Aguilar explained: “The death toll — the reason it’s so hidden and Israel and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will not allow any Western media into Gaza is because they don’t want to have accountability. The death toll, 150,000 to 200,000? No, we’re near 500,000 with bodies buried underneath the rubble.”

The complaint notes that the reported death toll of 53,000 as of May includes only the names of individuals whose deaths have been confirmed and registered in hospitals. It excludes thousands of people presumed dead but still buried beneath the rubble, those who died at home or en route to overwhelmed and under-resourced medical facilities and those perishing from preventable conditions due to the total collapse of Gaza’s health care system.

Following the press conference, participants marched to the Irish Hunger Memorial Park in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan, stopping along the way at corporations profiting from the genocide in Gaza.