By Jonathan Stempel
Jan 8 (Reuters) – A federal judge dismissed on Thursday a lawsuit demanding the U.S. government conduct emergency rescues of Palestinian Americans and family members who are trapped in Gaza and trying to escape hardships caused by the war between Israel and Hamas.
Chief Judge Virginia Kendall of the U.S. District Court in Chicago said she lacked the power and tools to evaluate “delicate foreign policy decisions” belonging to the government’s Executive Branch, while expressing sympathy with “the impossible positions in which many of the plaintiffs have found themselves.”
Nine Palestinian Americans, all U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, sued in December 2024, accusing the U.S. government of violating their constitutional right to equal protection by abandoning them in a war zone and not evacuating them as readily as it would evacuate other Americans.
They said destroyed homes, food shortages, poor medical care, mental anguish and other hardships imposed a “mandatory, non-discretionary duty” on the government to evacuate people from Gaza.
But the judge said she was ill-equipped to address how to coordinate an evacuation with neighboring countries, how to shepherd evacuees through dangerous “red zones,” which people are eligible for evacuations, and how the nonexistent U.S. diplomatic presence in Gaza would complicate the process.
“Endeavoring to answer these questions – and many more like them – from the comfort of chambers is both undoable and would also invade the political branches’ constitutionally committed tasks of determining when, how, and under what circumstances evacuations from war zones should proceed,” Kendall wrote.
The judge also said available evidence showed the U.S. government has developed an evacuation plan, and the nine plaintiffs had either been evacuated or rejected offers that did not cover immediate family members.
Lawyers from the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group, which represents the plaintiffs, had no immediate comment. The U.S. Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people and abducted 251 others in an October 7, 2023, assault on Israel, according to Israeli data. More than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.
The lawsuit was filed against former U.S. President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and continued against their respective successors Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Nia Williams)
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