Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) became the first member of the Senate to label Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.”
In an op-ed published on his website on Thursday, Sanders accused U.S. President Donald Trump of complicity in the “war crimes” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“With the Trump administration’s full support, the extremist Netanyahu government is openly pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank,” he wrote. “The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
Throughout his essay, Sanders, who is among the Jewish state’s fiercest critics in the Senate, cited international organizations that have been accused of anti-Israel bias, statistics that experts allege are dubious and quotations from Israeli officials removed from their original context.
“Israel has now killed some 65,000 people and wounded roughly 164,000,” Sanders wrote. He appeared to cite statistics from the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry.
Sanders also wrote that “Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than have been killed in any previous conflict.”
That claim, put forward by a researcher at Brown University in April, has been widely disputed. Yad Vashem records more than 1,400 Jewish journalists killed in the Holocaust, and Israel alleges that many of the roughly 250 “journalists” killed in Gaza were members of the Hamas terror organization. (Some 1,000 Yiddish journalists were killed in World War II.)
The United States must now cut off arms shipments to Israel, according to Sanders.
“We must use every ounce of our leverage to demand an immediate ceasefire, a massive surge of humanitarian aid facilitated by the United Nations and initial steps to provide Palestinians with a state of their own,” the Vermont senator wrote.
