Democratic campaign staffers who helped President Joe Biden win the election are now speaking out against his State Department s decision to approve a widely criticized $735 million weapon sale to Israel without congressional review and amid heightened tensions in the region that have led to hundreds of deaths.

The former campaign staffers, who are of Palestinian and Israeli descent, as well as of Jewish faith, said Tuesday that the approval is undemocratic, evades accountability and is unpopular among many of the Democratic voters who elected Biden.

I am outraged by this flagrant denial of even an effort to ensure human rights accountability. For a majority of Americans, including for me as a young Israeli American Jew, Palestinian rights are no exception and should not be treated as such in our foreign military assistance, said Matan Arad-Neeman, an organizer in Arizona and one of the staffers speaking out.

This month, the Israeli government and Hamas fought for 11 days after the Gaza militant group fired rockets into Israel a move that came after Israeli law enforcement attacked Palestinians in and around Al-Aqsa mosque, a holy site in East Jerusalem. Palestinians were protesting the Israeli governments ongoing efforts to forcefully evict them from East Jerusalem, which has been designated as a Palestinian territory.

Hamass rockets into Israel were largely stopped by its missile defense system but nevertheless killed 12 Israelis. The resulting Israeli airstrikes on Gaza , which does not have a missile defense system, killed at least 248 Palestinian civilians including at least 66 children and destroyed homes and institutions, leaving tens of thousands of Gazans displaced. After much resistance, the Israeli government agreed to a cease-fire with Hamas after Biden publicly called for the halt in warfare.