We all have the right to housing, clean water, healthcare, and other essential survival needs.

But instead of investing in these human rights, the U.S. government is sending billions of American tax dollars to Israel’s apartheid government, which controls Gaza’s borders and has cut off nearly all necessities from entering Gaza, such as food, water, baby formula, and key medical supplies.

With aid trucks just miles away, more than 1 million people in Gaza are facing imminent famine. Amid this forced starvation, Congress and the White House just cut funding for at least a year for UNRWA, the UN agency that’s the main provider and distributor of essential aid in Gaza.

Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, this legislation also continues sending billions of our tax dollars to Israel’s military without conditions, while it commits genocide. And it prohibits funding for UN investigations into the Israeli government’s human rights violations.

Human rights experts agree that Israel’s government is violating international humanitarian law in numerous ways, including by using starvation as a weapon of war—intentionally targeting Gaza’s food and water infrastructure, bombing aid centers, blocking aid trucks carrying key supplies and baby formula, and massacring starving Palestinians seeking food.

The world’s highest court found it plausible that Israel’s government is committing genocide, and demanded action to stop it.

As the top funder and weapons provider for Israel’s military, the U.S. government should use our leverage to stop the violence and force Israel’s government to allow in sufficient aid.

Instead, the U.S. government is deepening our complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Already, thousands of U.S.-made bombs have forcibly displaced millions of Palestinians in Gaza. Nearly everyone in Gaza has had to move multiple times in the past five months, and most have sought shelter in UNRWA facilities.

As the best-equipped group to provide life-saving humanitarian aid on a massive scale in Gaza, UNRWA needs funding now more than ever.

And now's the time to keep up the pressure for a permanent ceasefire. The U.S. abstained from but did not block a vote this week in the UN Security Council, which demands a temporary ceasefire through the end of Ramadan.

Sign the petition to Congress and the White House: Rather than arming and funding genocide with our tax dollars, the U.S. government must reinstate UNRWA funding, demand a permanent ceasefire, and also invest in U.S. communities’ needs.