THE HAGUE/BERLIN/PARIS/WASHINGTON In The Hague, a serious young Dutch bureaucrat works on policies that are supposed to deter violations of human rights, from Myanmars crackdown on its ethnic minorities to Russians directing slaughter in Ukraine.

But shes worried: If those efforts seem hypocritical or selective, they could have little impact. Her government claims it wants to promote international law everywhere. All the while, the Netherlands has continued to back Israels offensive in Gaza a campaign accused of hundreds of breaches of international humanitarian law.

In Berlin, a German official is beginning to question why she wasted time studying law. The countrys leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has said that Israel is a democracy, and therefore there is no doubt it will not violate international law, the official told HuffPost, visibly distraught on a rainy June evening. If some players can never be wrong, what do you need a legal system for?

And in Washington, a veteran civil servant named Stacy Gilbert quit the State Department in May after spending months trying to pressure Israel to let more aid reach Palestinians. In working on humanitarian crises for 20 years, she said she cannot think of another situation where things have been allowed to become this bad.

The U.S., Gilbert told HuffPost, has turned a blind eye to where we have responsibility. That is, our arms sales [to Israel] have continued, and that makes us complicit.

A few weeks after Gilbert resigned, British diplomat Mark Smith told hundreds of his colleagues the United Kingdom may be complicit in war crimes because of its weapons shipments to Israel. He conveyed the warning in an Aug. 16 email announcing his own resignation from the government, which he described as a message I never wanted to send.

On Oct. 7, 2023, a rampage inside Israel by the Gaza-based militant group Hamas set off a new war in the Middle East. The conflict immediately implicated the U.S. and its peer countries because of their closeness with Israel and their deep ties to the region, from their vast military bases to economic links worth billions of dollars.

Almost since the latest round of fighting in Gaza began, Western governments have faced a pitched internal rebellion over their role in the war from hundreds of their own officials. Government staffers across the West have mobilized to urge domestic political leaders and fellow citizens to think critically about Israels approach and whether support for it is justified.

HuffPost interviewed nearly two dozen current and former officials challenging their governments post-Oct. 7 policies in four capitals, tapping an international whisper network. HuffPost is shielding most of their identities.

While limits on political activity by government employees vary from country to country, unauthorized conversations with the press are generally a red line. Sources also feared they would be targeted by pro-Israel activists or by right-wing media outlets in many Western countries, which demonize bureaucrats as standing in the way of populist policies.

Conversations with these officials reveal insular patterns in policymaking around the war in many of the worlds most powerful democracies, and illuminate how the bloodshed in Gaza has forged bonds among concerned government employees across boundaries of citizenship, specialty and rank.

The near-unconditional backing of Israel by Western countries, led by the U.S., is driving unconscionable Palestinian suffering, degrading global protections for civilians, undermining those countries other goals and worsening Mideast tensions and anti-Western feeling to a dangerous degree, the skeptics argue.

Facing charges of genocide, Israel says it must defend itself. It argues it takes steps to reduce collateral damage and blames the wars civilian toll on militants for embedding within Arab communities. Many Western governments echo those points.

The dissenters say they have shared, and continue to share, their advice inside government, only for leaders to discount and exclude inconvenient voices.

At the wars one-year mark, this opposition movement by Western officials can only claim limited success in influencing policy. But its importance and the stakes of a rethink are arguably higher than ever.

Among observers of the region, a leading concern about Israels actions since last October has been that they will spark a regional war, leading to ever-deadlier attacks across a range of countries. That prospect presently looks hard to avoid.

This week, Israel invaded its neighbor Lebanon, ostensibly to weaken the Iran-linked militia Hezbollah but without sharing a clear plan for its mission there, and Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel escalations by two of the regions best-armed forces. The U.S. has pledged to support Israel in its Lebanese operation and in striking back at Iran, boosting anxieties that American troops, now being surged to the Middle East, will be caught up in the clashes.

Endorsing the Lebanon invasion in particular, enthusiastic White House officials saw the prospect as an opportunity to weaken Hezbollah and Iranian power broadly, and discounted concerns from intelligence, State Department and Pentagon officials, sources told HuffPost and Politico reported .

I and many others have warned repeatedly that this is where the administration was taking us, Harrison Mann, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who left the U.S. Army in June over the Gaza war, told HuffPost this week, referring to a genocide in Gaza and nihilistic wars of choice in Lebanon and Iran.

For the six months I worked on this war, I was able to see often in real time when the administrations public statements did not match the reality on the ground as reported by its own intelligence agencies, Mann continued. My hope was, and remains, that those of us with experience in government have the ability to more credibly challenge the falsehoods spread by the Biden-Harris administration, educate the American public, lawmakers and advocates and contribute to the pressure to end the killing.

The situation echoes the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in terms of both the potentially tremendous consequences of escalation and the deep misgivings over the direction of policy among many subject-matter experts. The level of internal dissent, particularly in the U.S., is greater now than it has been at any time since that moment in 2003, the objectors and even officials unaffiliated with them say.

As the Bush administration devised its Iraq policy, State Department staff and other officials at the time internally predicted the U.S. would cause chaos there and urged a different approach. At least three American diplomats resigned . Eventually, the critics were vindicated. After years of debate and as horrors continue to be unearthed, the Iraq strategy, which destabilized that country and empowered extremist groups like the Islamic State, is widely seen as a cautionary tale.

Today, current and former Western officials say it would be irresponsible to wait for that eventual reflection, and argue a course correction now would save lives and limit the harmful long-term effects of a policy they see as too deferential to Israels hawkish government.

They have formed a small but influential subset of the worldwide movement for a different Middle East strategy, arguing the West must reaffirm international and domestic laws governing warfare and prioritize diplomacy, from a cease-fire in Gaza to a just Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

Their actions, ranging from demonstrations and public statements to resignations, are an indisputable part of the story of the post-Oct. 7 war highlighted in news outlets around the world, discussed at State Department briefings, in Congress and among delegates at the Democratic National Convention and cited by antiwar voices, including senior politicians .

Few in this loosely unified group of frustrated government officials ever saw themselves as activists. Many are longtime bureaucrats who feel overwhelmed when they get too many notifications on the encrypted messaging app Signal, a tool theyd had little use for before. They are fundamentally institutionalists.

Yet the gravity of the situation has compelled them to act in new ways, they told HuffPost.

If the West kills international law, nobody can revive it, a European Union official told HuffPost.

Fearing a more brutal world, the officials see Israels expanding warfare as potentially fatal for principles they sincerely believe their countries represent. They condemn Hamas, consistently. But their nations are not arming Hamas.

The more Western governments fuel Israeli actions akin to collective punishment , the more those same Western governments weaken standards for which they are frequent, if imperfect, champions, like the Geneva Conventions or universal human rights, the argument goes. If those ideals dissipate, so might prospects for holding any country, faction or leader accountable.

The dissenters have rallied at a risky moment. Hard-right forces many of them ardently pro-Israel claim career civil servants represent an undemocratic, obstructionist deep state. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has pledged to put thousands of bureaucrats into an employment category, known as Schedule F, that will make it easy to boot them for political reasons, and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), has suggested Trump fire every single mid-level bureaucrat and replace them with our people.

Already, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly condemned U.S. officials who question support for Israel. When some bureaucrats took a day off work to signal their displeasure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said they should be fired, and in December, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) urged investigations of officials who signed a call for a cease-fire.

Their ideological allies are gaining ground in Europe. As of this summer, the government of the Netherlands is dominated by far-right politician Geert Wilders, who has wedded his anti-Muslim narratives to an intense commitment to Israel. Wilders condemned the Dutch army chief for questioning Israels killing of civilians and this week appeared to endorse an Israeli confrontation against Iran, calling its leader a psychopath on X .

But to some, political tumult in the West in recent years has only underscored the value of government staff standing firm in defense of nonpartisan oaths. Before he became CIA director and a key player in President Joe Bidens Gaza approach, the former diplomat William Burns wrote in 2019: The real threat to our democracy is not from an imagined deep state. Instead, it comes from a weak state of hollowed-out institutions and battered and belittled public servants, no longer able to uphold the ever more fragile guardrails of our democracy or compete on an ever more crowded, complicated, and competitive international landscape.

One official in the U.S., a well-connected 25-year veteran of the civil service deeply involved in the organization Feds United For Peace, said she and her colleagues are proud of their work to push back on support for Israel.

They wish it wasnt needed, and that theyd had a greater effect so far on Middle East policy, she told HuffPost. But they see their mobilization as one of lasting importance, she said, with a nod to Trump.

People have started to understand the power of moral clarity and of civil servants, respectfully and in appropriate ways, communicating with Americans and people around the world, the bureaucrat continued. Weve exercised that muscle, and it may prove valuable in the future.

Sounding The Alarm

The Oct. 7 attack immediately spurred public solidarity with Israel from Western governments. But privately, officials in many of those countries warned leaders that their rush to help a longtime ally should also account for Israels history of brutality toward Palestinians. The general message: Help, but carefully.

Josh Paul, then a State Department official who worked on weapons transfers, emailed colleagues on Oct. 8 warning about how Israel might use U.S. military equipment in unacceptable ways, he told HuffPost. Unbeknownst to him, one of his colleagues, Dubai-based diplomat Hala Rharrit, was also sending messages in early October urging the administration to ensure its public comments recognized Palestinian suffering, not just that of Israelis. Failing to do so would alienate people across the Middle East, she argued.

Senior U.S. officials separately alerted the White House about possible Israeli war crimes and the strategic cost of unchecked support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus plans, Reuters recently revealed .

By Oct. 10, the day after Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced there would be no electricity, no food, no fuel for Gaza, a German official who worked in international development emailed her peers saying she anticipated a massacre.

Decision-makers didnt listen to those alarm bells. Germany quickly counted among the most hawkish supporters of Israels disproportionate military response, boosting weapons exports to the Israelis, researcher Sajjad Safaei wrote for the Stimson Center think tank. The U.S. flooded Israel with arms and shielded it from calls to halt the fighting. Paul quit the State Department on Oct. 17 in a development first reported by HuffPost , sending shockwaves in the press and among other government workers who were appalled by Western policy but nervous about speaking up .