[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 131 (Wednesday, July 30, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Page S4864]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                  Gaza

  Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the mass starvation and death sweeping 
through Gaza is a moral tragedy and a strategic abomination.
  What started as a war with a just cause--to go after Hamas for the 
unspeakable atrocities it committed on October 7 and bring home the 
hostages--quickly turned unjust and immoral.
  Now, everybody knows how complicated and fraught the Middle East is. 
Everyone knows that navigating this generations-long conflict requires 
nuance and depth and a historical understanding in order to try to get 
it right. Everyone knows that smart and sincere and decent people can 
disagree on this issue. But what is happening today is entirely 
different. There is no excuse for this horrific suffering. It is not 
making Israel or Israelis or Jews any safer, nor is it helping to bring 
home the 50 remaining hostages who have been in brutal captivity for 
almost 2 years.
  The fact that this catastrophe was preventable is precisely what 
makes it so indefensible. People have been warning for months that the 
Israeli Government's actions would result in exactly this kind of 
tragedy, where children are dying by the dozens and hundreds of 
thousands of people have been starving for days.
  The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel scrambled to set up 2 
months ago, has failed. According to the BBC, where there used to be 
400 U.N. aid distribution sites all across Israel and Gaza, there are 
now just 4 run by the GHF. As a result, a third of Gazans--a third of 
Gazans--are going multiple days in a row without eating.
  The World Health Organization reports that at least 63 people--many 
of them children--have died from malnutrition this month alone, and 
more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid at GHF 
sites, according to the U.N.
  In May, the GHF's first executive director resigned, saying:

       It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan 
     while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles 
     of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.

  Whether you believe this organization was set up to fail 
intentionally from the start or, more charitably, that the Israeli 
Government established it without understanding that it couldn't 
succeed, it doesn't matter. What is plainly obvious now is that it is 
not working.
  You don't have to be some leftwing organization or get your data from 
the Hamas government to acknowledge that the GHF is failing at its 
fundamental mission of feeding people, which raises the question, why?

  Here we have an Israeli security apparatus that can and did 
synchronize an attack of exploding pagers across an entire country. 
They can reach and gather intelligence from the high command of their 
greatest adversaries. The IDF is widely viewed as punching way above 
its weight in almost every way. Yet Israel is asserting that, given all 
of those capabilities, the one thing they can't do is facilitate aid 
distribution. That is too hard for them.
  Food and medical assistance routinely get into conflict zones around 
the world--Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo. 
Gaza should not be any different.
  What is different are the stated goals of the extremists in the 
Israeli Government:

       The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is 
     to completely stop the ``humanitarian'' aid, conquer the 
     entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.

  That was the National Security Minister of the Government of Israel--
completely stopping humanitarian aid, conquering the entire Gaza strip, 
and encouraging migration. These are their words; these are not my 
words.
  As the starvation takes hold, their response is to deny that it is 
even happening. There is no starvation in Gaza. Who said that? The 
Prime Minister of Israel.
  Ben Gvir added--I have to collect myself before saying what Ben Gvir 
said:

       If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages 
     home.

  ``If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages home.'' 
It is worth pausing on that for just a moment. Too many people in the 
Netanyahu government make no distinction between the actual enemy that 
is Hamas and innocent civilians.
  The idea that a desperate mother, malnourished herself and out of 
breast milk for her infant, or a 7-year-old running to the front of an 
aid line to get whatever scraps he can for himself and his siblings--
the idea that these people are in charge of which hostages are released 
and when, that they suddenly are being held to account for the actions 
of Hamas on October 7, is preposterous. It is another example of the 
casual dismissal of civilian death and suffering as if it is an 
inevitable consequence--war is hell and all of that. But what possible 
explanation is there for letting infants and 2- and 3-year-olds starve? 
What tactical advantage is being gained?
  Standing up for our shared humanity, whatever our other differences 
and preferences, should not be a matter of controversy, but too often, 
when someone is critical of Israel and they are a Jew, they are 
characterized as a self-hating Jew. And if someone is critical of 
Israel and they are not a Jew, they are characterized as anti-Semitic.
  I want to be crystal clear. Anti-Semitism is among the oldest and 
most vile prejudices that exist. It is real, it is scary, and it is on 
the rise in the United States. It should be fought at every turn--left, 
right, and center. Anyone who simply waves it away or denies the 
urgency of addressing it is either not paying attention or lying.
  But criticizing the conduct of this war; criticizing Minister Ben 
Gvir, who talks about ethnic cleansing; criticizing the withholding of 
aid; criticizing the excessive tolerance for civilian casualties; 
criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu's apparent willingness to cling to 
power at the expense of Israel, Israelis, and Jews everywhere--that is 
a separate matter. Everybody gets to do that, just like Americans get 
to criticize their President without hating America or the people 
within it. People are more than their governments.
  The Government of Israel is behaving terribly. The conduct of this 
war is indefensible. And it is not in spite of my Jewishness and my 
Judaism that I say that; it is because of it.
  There are a lot of people, including people I know personally--and I 
believe this--who believe in the sacred idea of Israel.
  They are good people, and this cannot be about vanquishing one side 
of the political spectrum, whether that is the left and center left or 
the right and the alt right. This is about grounding ourselves in a 
very basic principle, which is, whatever else we are fighting about, 
can we please hold the children harmless?
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.