The lawsuit also calls for an end to the $3.8 billion in annual military support that the US provides to Israel.

United States President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin are facing a federal complaint for failing to prevent but instead aiding what has been described as “genocide” in Gaza.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a New York civil liberties group, filed the complaint on Monday on behalf of Palestinian human rights organisations, Palestinians in Gaza, and US citizens with relatives in the besieged enclave.

The lawsuit points out their “failure to prevent and complicity in the Israeli government’s unfolding genocide,” citing Washington’s extensive financial and military support to Israel.

The legal action comes was taken following weeks-long relentless bombardment by Israel that has resulted in the killing of more than 11,300 Palestinians.

“Numerous Israeli government leaders have expressed clear genocidal intentions and deployed dehumanising characterisations of Palestinians, including ‘human animals’,” the CCR’s complaint read.

It stated that those “statements of intent”, when coupled with the “mass killing” of Palestinians, provide “evidence of an unfolding crime of genocide.”

Various legal scholars, rights groups, and humanitarian organisations have also labeled Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, echoing concerns raised in the complaint.

“Immediately after the launch of Israel’s unprecedented bombing campaign on Gaza, President Biden offered ‘unwavering’ support for Israel, which he and administration officials have consistently repeated and backed up with military, financial, and political support, even as mass civilian casualties escalated alongside Israeli genocidal rhetoric,” the CCR said.

The lawsuit points out Washington’s role as Israel’s closest ally and its largest military aid provider since World War II, suggesting that the US could have a deterrent effect on Israeli officials. Instead, it maintains, Biden, Blinken, and Austin “have helped advance the gravest of crimes” by maintaining unconditional support for Israel while undermining international efforts to halt the bombardment.

Astha Sharma Pokharel, a lawyer at the CCR, told Al Jazeera, “They have a significant responsibility under customary international law, under federal law, to prevent this genocide, to stop supporting this genocide. At every step of the way, at every opportunity, they have failed.”

“They have continued to provide cover to Israel; they have continued to provide material support to Israel; and currently, they intend to send more money and more weapons to Israel.”

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Laila al-Haddad, a US citizen, lost five relatives in Gaza during the attacks. She expressed a unique responsibility for American taxpayers, saying “I paid for Israel to kill my cousins and my aunt, there’s no two ways around it.”

“It was my tax dollars that did that, that sent those bombs to Israel to kill my family. And so I feel I and all other American taxpayers have a very unique responsibility to hold our government and our elected officials responsible,” she told Al Jazeera.

The lawsuit also calls for an end to the $3.8 billion in annual military support that the US provides to Israel.

US lead role in Israel war on Gaza

Following Hamas’s attack on October 7, the Biden administration and key members of Congress quickly crafted an aid package to help Israel ease into its war on Gaza.

Initially proposed at around $2 billion in increased defence funding, supplementing the existing annual $3.8 billion sent to Israel by the US, the plan underwent a significant change.

When Biden formally submitted the request to Congress on October 20, he sought a substantial increase, aiming for $14 billion, seven times more than the original proposal.

More than one month since the war on Gaza, Biden’s plan to send billions more to Israel faces obstacles. Speaker Mike Johnson rejected the president’s proposal for a $105 billion national security package, including $61 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.

House Republicans passed a separate Israel aid bill, offsetting costs by cutting IRS funding, but it’s unlikely to succeed in the Senate.

Washington currently allocates $3.8 billion yearly for the Israeli regime’s defence based on a 2016 memorandum of understanding signed between the former Obama administration and the Netanyahu government.

Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, described the decision to provide an additional $14 billion for Israel’s defence, coupled with Biden’s deployment of two aircraft carrier strike groups to the region, as a “historic inflection point” in the US-Israel relationship.

The Biden administration told the US Congress its intention to transfer $320 million worth of precision bombs to Israel, according to a source familiar with the matter last week. The formal notification of the planned transfer of Spice Family Gliding Bomb Assemblies, a precision-guided weapon utilised by warplanes, was reportedly sent to congressional leaders on October 31, as initially reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The Pentagon also continues to provide weapons shipments almost on a daily basis to Israel, Pentagon deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters. “We are not putting any limits on how Israel uses weapons,” Singh said.

“That is really up to the Israeli Defense Force to use and how they are going to conduct their operations.”

Meanwhile, late October, the Director of the New York Office of UN High Commissioner of Human Rights resigned in protest over the organisation’s inability to take action against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, describing western governments as “wholly complicit in the horrific assault”.

“Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organisation that we serve appears powerless to stop it,” Craig Mokhiber said in a statement addressed to the UN high commissioner in Geneva, Volker Turk.

The director, who had worked with the UN for more than three decades, wrote a four-page letter that called the Israeli war an “ethno-nationalist colonial-settler ideology” designed to uphold a “systematic persecution” of Arabs.

“The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial-settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt,” Mokhiber added.

He added that the strategies used by the Israeli government on Palestinians is a “text-book case of genocide” and said the US, UK, and much of Europe were not only complicit in the massacre but have allowed Western corporate media to dehumanise Palestinians.

“What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe are wholly complicit in the horrific assault,” he wrote. “US-based social media companies are suppressing the voices of human rights defenders while amplifying pro-Israel propaganda.”