BURLINGTON, Vt., July 25 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today released the following statement calling on the United States to act to end Israel’s illegal war in Gaza.
After 21 months of brutal war, the Netanyahu government’s extermination of Gaza is entering a new and terrible phase. America and the world cannot continue to look away. We must reckon with what is being done with our taxpayer money, our weapons and the support of our government.
More than that, we must act to stop it.
After many months of Israel blocking humanitarian aid, children and other vulnerable people are starving to death in increasing numbers. The World Food Programme says that the food crisis has reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.” Children’s bodies are eating themselves from within, their organs are shutting down. Starving mothers cannot breastfeed their infants, and no formula is available, with little clean water to make it in any case. Hospitals have run out of nutritional treatments, and doctors themselves are fainting from hunger.
When mass death from starvation begins, it is difficult to reverse. Aid groups say Gaza faces a tidal wave of preventable death. This is the direct result of the Israeli government’s policies. From March 2 to May 19, Israel did not allow a single shipment of aid into Gaza — no food, water, fuel or medical supplies for a population of more than 2 million people. Israel has since allowed a trickle of aid to get in, but nowhere near enough to meet the enormous needs of a population starved for so long.
Earlier this week, 28 of our closest allies, including Britain, Japan and numerous European nations, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.” More than 1,000 Palestinians have been shot down while trying to get food aid over the past two months. Most of these deaths are the result of Israel’s replacement of the established United Nations distribution system with the untested Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose few distribution points have become death traps for Palestinian civilians, with near-daily massacres.
This is the reality: Having already killed or wounded 200,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, the extremist Israeli government is using mass starvation to engineer the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Don’t take my word for it, listen to Israeli minister Amichay Eliyahu, who said this week: “All Gaza will be Jewish… the government is pushing for Gaza being wiped out. Thank God, we are wiping out this evil.”
Despite these war crimes, carried out daily in plain view, the United States has provided more than $22 billion for Israel’s military operations since this war began. In other words, American taxpayer dollars are being used to starve children, bomb civilians and support the cruelty of Netanyahu and his criminal ministers.
Enough is enough. The White House and Congress must immediately act to end this war using the full scope of American influence. No more military aid to the Netanyahu government. History will condemn those who fail to act in the face of this horror.
