WASHINGTON, July 30 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today rose to force a vote on two Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to block offensive arms sales to Israel in light of the daily civilian massacres and unfolding famine created by the Netanyahu government’s policies. The JRD is the only formal mechanism available to Congress to prevent an arms sale noticed by the administration from advancing.
Sanders’ remarks introducing the vote today, as prepared for delivery, are below and can be watched live HERE:
M. President, let me begin by stating what this debate is about, and what it is not about. It is not about whether anyone in the Senate disagrees that Hamas is a terrorist organization, which began this war with a brutal terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages. Everyone agrees with that.
The International Criminal Court was right to indict the leaders of Hamas as war criminals for those atrocities. There is also, I believe, no disagreement as to whether or not Israel had a right to defend itself, like any other country suffering an attack like that. Clearly, it did.
And, in a certain sense, this debate is not really about Israel. It is about the United States of America, and whether we will abide by U.S. and international law, or whether we will continue to contribute billions of dollars to an extremist government in Israel, which has caused an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza. This debate is over whether or not the United States of America will have any moral credibility on the international scene. Whether or not we will be able, with a straight face, to condemn other countries who commit barbaric acts if we don’t stand up tonight. That is what we are debating.
M. President, the vast majority of the American people and the world community understand that the Netanyahu government in Israel has gone well beyond defending itself from Hamas. Over the last 21 months, it has waged an all-out, illegal, immoral and horrific war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.
This war has already killed some 60,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 143,000 — most of whom are women, children and the elderly. In a population of just over two million, more than 200,000 people have been killed or wounded since this war began. That, M. President, is 10% of the population of Gaza.
M. President, to put that into scale so we as Americans can understand the enormity of what is happening there, if that kind of destruction happened in the United States — if 10% of our population were killed or wounded in war, it would mean that 34 million of us would have been killed or wounded.
The toll on Gaza’s children is unspeakable, and it is literally hard to imagine. The United Nations reports that more than 18,000 children have been killed since this war began. Just this morning, the Washington Post published a list of all these children’s names, and I ask that these names be entered into the Congressional Record.
I should mention that more than 12,000 of these children were under the age of 12, and more than 3,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated. That is how this war has impacted the children in Gaza. But it’s not just the horrific loss of life that we are seeing.
New satellite imagery shows that Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment has destroyed 70% of all structures in Gaza. The UN estimates that 92% of the housing units have been damaged or destroyed. Most of the population is now living in tents or other makeshift structures.
And let us not forget, over the last 21 months, these people, most of whom are poor, have been displaced time and time again — told to go here, told to go there, moved around with often no possessions other than the clothing on their backs.
M. President, the health care system in Gaza has been destroyed. Most of the territory’s hospitals and primary health care facilities have been bombed. More than 1,500 health care workers have been killed, as well as 336 UN staff.
Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been totally devastated, including almost 90% of water and sanitation facilities. Raw sewage now runs all over Gaza. Most of the roads have been destroyed. Gaza’s educational system has been obliterated. Hundreds of schools have been bombed, as has every single one of Gaza’s 12 universities. And there has been no electricity in Gaza for 21 months.
M. President, all of this is a horror unto itself. But in recent months, the Netanyahu government’s extermination of Gaza has made an unspeakable and horrible situation even worse.
From March 2 to May 19, Israel did not allow a single shipment of humanitarian aid into Gaza — no food, no water, no fuel and no medical supplies for a distressed population of two million people over a period of 11 weeks. Since then, Israel has allowed a trickle of aid to get into Gaza, but nowhere near enough to meet the enormous needs of a population besieged for so long.
M. President, when you cut off all food to a population, what happens is not surprising. People starve to death. And that is exactly what Israeli policy has deliberately done — it is causing mass starvation and famine.
Children and other vulnerable people are dying in increasing numbers. In the last two weeks, dozens of young children have died from starvation. Starving mothers cannot breastfeed their infants, and no formula is available, and certainly no clean water to make it, in any case. Hospitals have run out of nutritional treatments, and doctors and nurses who are already treating the desperate, they themselves are going hungry and are fainting from hunger.
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.”
Just yesterday, the gold-standard UN-backed food monitoring group, the IPC, issued a new report saying: “The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.”
When mass death from starvation begins, it is difficult to reverse. Aid groups say it will soon be too late to stop a wave of preventable deaths in Gaza, all of which is the direct result of the Israeli government’s policies.
M. President, what I’m going to describe now is gruesome, but I think it is important for us to understand what is happening to the children in Gaza.
Mark Brauner, an American doctor who spent in two weeks in Gaza in June described the situation: “a lot of the children have already passed the point of no return where their physiology has eroded to the point where even refeeding could potentially cause death itself. The gut lining has started to auto-digest and it will no longer have adequate absorptive capacity for water or for nutrition. Death is unfortunately imminent for probably thousands of children.”
That’s an American physician who was in Gaza in June.
M. President, what the extremist Netanyahu government is doing now is not an effort to win a war. There is no military purpose in starving thousands and thousands of children. Let us be clear: This is not an effort to win a war, this is an effort to destroy a people.
Having already killed or wounded more than 200,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, the extremist Israeli government is using mass starvation to engineer the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They are trying to drive a desperate people out of their homeland, to God knows where.
This is not my speculation; this what Israeli ministers and officials are saying themselves.
A few months ago, the Finance Minister vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed.” Just last week, another current Israeli minister said: “All Gaza will be Jewish… the government is pushing for Gaza being wiped out. Thank God, we are wiping out this evil.” Another Likud member of the Knesset and former minister called for “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth.”
And in the West Bank, we see this agenda being carried out clearly and methodically, with more than 500,000 Israeli settlers now illegally occupying land integral to any future Palestinian state. Earlier this month, the Knesset even approved a non-binding motion in favor of formally annexing the West Bank.
This slow-motion annexation is backed by violence: Israeli security forces and settler extremists have killed thousands of Palestinians in recent years. Israeli settlers brutally beat a young American to death earlier this month, the seventh American killed in the West Bank since 2022. Despite a demand from President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, no one has been held accountable for these deaths.
M. President, people around the world are outraged by what is going on in Gaza right now, and countries are increasingly demanding that Netanyahu’s government stop what they are doing.
France and Canada have said they will recognize a Palestinian state. The United Kingdom has said it will do so, as well, if Israel does not immediately end this war and surge humanitarian aid. And at the UN last month, 149 countries voted for a ceasefire resolution condemning the use of starvation as a weapon of war and demanding an end to Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid. But it is not just the international community.
Just yesterday, Gallup, one of the best polling organizations in our country, released a new poll that shows that just 32% of Americans support Israel’s military action in Gaza, while 60% oppose it. To my Democratic colleagues here in the Senate, I would point out that only 8% of Democrats support this war, and just 25% of independents. And to my Republican colleagues, I would point out that more and more Republicans are beginning to speak out against the atrocities of this war and the fact that billions of billions of taxpayer dollars are going to a government in Israel waging an illegal war.
Further, M. President, a recent Economist/YouGov poll shows that just 15% of the American people support increasing military aid to Israel, while 35% support decreasing military aid to Israel or stopping it entirely. Just 8% of Democrats support increasing military aid to Israel.
M. President, the American people are haunted by the images coming out of Gaza.
These are desperate children with pots in their hands, crying, begging for food in order to stay alive. That’s what the American people are seeing every night on TV, on the internet and in the newspapers. These are emaciated children, their bodies, in some cases, barely more than skeletons. The American people are seeing miles and miles of rubble where cities and towns once stood. They are seeing innocent people shot down while they wait on line to get food while they are starving.
M. President, 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. One estimate, based on Brown University research, calculates that the United States has paid for 70% of the Gaza war. In other words, American taxpayer dollars are being used to starve children, bomb schools, kill civilians and support the cruelty of Netanyahu and his criminal ministers. And that, M. President, is why I have brought these two resolutions of disapproval to block offensive arms sales to Israel.
S.J.Res.34 would prohibit the U.S.-taxpayer financed $675.7 million sale of thousands of 1,000-pound bombs and many thousands of JDAM guidance kits.
And S.J.Res.41 would prohibit the sale of tens of thousands of fully automatic assault rifles.
These arms sales clearly violate the Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibit sending arms to countries that violate international law by killing civilians and blocking humanitarian aid — and very few people doubt that that is exactly what Israel is doing. If you want to obey the law, vote for these resolutions.
The rifles in question will go to arm a police force overseen by far-right, extremist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has long advocated for the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from the region, who was convicted of support for terrorism by an Israeli court, and who has distributed weapons to violent settlers in the West Bank. Ben-Gvir has formed new police units comprised of extremist settlers and has boasted about how many weapons he has distributed to vigilante settlers in the West Bank. And you want to give him more rifles? That’s what one of these resolutions is about.
These are rifles the Biden administration held back over fears they would be used by extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank to terrorize Palestinians and push them from their homes and villages.
M. President, U.S. taxpayers have spent many, many billions of dollars in support of the racist, extremist Netanyahu government. Enough is enough.
Americans want this to end. They do not want to be complicit in an unfolding famine and daily civilian massacres. And we here in Congress tonight have the power to act. No more talks, no more great speeches. But tonight, we have the power to act — the power to force Netanyahu and his extremist government to end this slaughter.
The time is long overdue for Congress to use the leverage we have — tens of billions in arms and military aid — to demand that Israel end these atrocities.
At a time when Israeli soldiers are shooting civilians trying to get food aid on a near-daily basis, when extremist settlers are pushing Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, and when Gaza is witnessing mass starvation as a result of Israeli government policy, the United States should not and must not be providing more weapons to enable these atrocities.
M. President, whatever happens tonight, history will condemn those who fail to act in the face of these horrors.
