Amid mostly silence in Congress, some US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political spectrum spoke out Saturday over a UN-backed report warning of famine in parts of Gaza.
“Let’s be clear: President Trump has the power to end the starvation of the Palestinian people,” Vermont’s politically independent senator Bernie Sanders posted on X. “Instead he is doing nothing while watching this famine unfold. Enough is enough. No more American taxpayer dollars to Nethanyahu’s [sic] war machine.”
Sanders, who also pushed resolutions to ban selling US weapons to Israel, has long been consistent about his concern regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza amid the war.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the outspoken, far-right Georgia Republican, also called for greater compassion for Palestinians in a social media post Saturday, a day after UN secretary general António Gutteres described the famine in the territory as a “failure of humanity”.
The US representative, in a departure from the majority of her peers in Congress, described the Gaza humanitarian crisis as a genocide last month. In a long post on X, she then said that while Israel’s war against Hamas was justified, the suffering of civilians was not.
“Does Hamas deserve it? Yes,” Greene wrote, in part. “Do innocent people and children deserve it? No.”
“The innocent people in Gaza did not kill and kidnap the innocent people in Israel on Oct 7th,” she continued. “Just as we spoke out and had compassion for the victims and families of Oct7, how can Americans not speak out and have compassion for the masses of innocent people and children in Gaza?”
Greene linked the entirety of US financial and military aid to Israel to the conflict, arguing that it “means every U.S. tax payer is contributing to Israel’s military actions”.
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with,” Greene concluded. “And I will not be silent about it.”
The post received an almost immediate response from far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who reportedly petitioned the White House to suspend the entry of injured Palestinian children from Gaza to the US.
Greene and Loomer, both claiming the mantle of Maga authenticity, have bitterly clashed on the issue, with Loomer falsely describing Palestinian children as a “national security threat” and “Islamic invaders”.
Loomer, who is Jewish, once claimed that her ban from social media platforms for anti-Muslim hate speech was antisemitic, while Greene infamously shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory that wildfires in California might have been started by Jewish space lasers.
On Saturday, Loomer hit out at Greene, falsely accusing her of calling for Palestinians from Gaza to be resettled in the US and asking: “Why are you advocating for GAZANS to come to the US? How is Islamic immigration ‘America First’?”
The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said last week that parts of Gaza are experiencing a “man-made” famine in the Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City, site of a new Israeli offensive.
“As this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the report said. “The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed.”
The Israeli agency heading aid distribution in Gaza, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), rejected the report, saying it “relies on partial, biased data and superficial information originating from Hamas”.
On Saturday, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said on X that “the [international] media is missing the real story of ‘famine’ in Gaza. Hostages ARE starving, Hamas is getting fat, & the UN declares famine while 92% of THEIR food is stolen to be sold by Hamas. Meanwhile UN food sits rotting in sun. The UN should declare itself corrupt & incompetent.”
In her post, Greene wrote that if the US were being bombed day and night, with millions killed or injured, and the world said “Americans voted for their government so they deserve it… How would you feel? What would you think? What would you do?”
