Part of the Series
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced on Thursday that he would soon force a vote in the Senate on two joint resolutions to block the Trump administration from selling an additional $8.8 billion in certain bombs and weapons to Israel in the next week.
While the joint resolutions opposing the weapons transfer have little chance of passing the GOP-controlled Congress, a vote would force lawmakers to make their position public during yet another critical juncture in Israel’s genocide on the besieged Strip.
The announcement came the same day as Palestinian Americans who have lost family members in Gaza held a press conference to demand their congressional representatives support an arms embargo.
“I am here because Israel bombed a six-story building with three generations of my family,” said Rajaa Alrayyes, a Palestinian wife and mother living in Chicago, in a press conference on Thursday. “Some of my family members are still buried under the rubble and Israel won’t let us give them a decent burial.”
Sanders, who is Jewish, called the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “extremist.” Sanders also said that “Netanyahu has clearly violated U.S. and international law” over the course of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Israel has not allowed food, drinking water or medicine into Gaza for three and a half weeks, Sanders said, and the blocking of humanitarian aid is a “morally abhorrent and a clear violation of both the Geneva Convention and the Foreign Assistance Act.” He further noted that Israel has dropped U.S.-provided 2,000-pound bombs into crowded neighborhoods; the Trump administration has made more of those bombs available to Israel.
Hundreds of people have been killed since Israel broke a fragile ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza last week as Netanyahu sought to appease far right politicians who support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to make way for Israeli settlers. Recent Israeli attacks forcibly displaced more than 142,000 Palestinians in Gaza who have already been uprooted multiple times, as Israel reignited its war on Gaza that has killed more than 61,000 people since October 2023.
“To survive Israel’s bombs, snipers and drones, my family has tried to split up, going to different shelters, hospitals and tents,” said William Asfour, a 28-year-old Palestinian American living in the Chicago area, during the press conference on Thursday. “If one group is bombed, the other might have a chance to survive.”
Asfour said he has lost dozens of family members in Gaza, including seven of his young cousins and their two parents who were killed during Israeli assaults over the past 10 days. He read their names aloud and held up a picture of the youngest victim, a 9-year-old girl. The girl’s father is a doctor and nutritionist at Nasser Hospital. Asfour said Israel destroyed his home, killing everyone inside.
“This is what is left of his wife, his mother and his children,” Asfour said, holding up photos of destruction. “By the way, they targeted his family again six hours ago.”
Earlier this week the Israeli military bombed Nasser Hospital, one of Gaza’s largest medical centers. The attack killed a Hamas official who was reportedly receiving medical care, the Israeli military said and Hamas confirmed. Feroze Sidhwa, a volunteer doctor at Nasser Hospital and a U.S. citizen, said a teenage boy who had been his patient was also killed in the strike.
“He would have gone home tomorrow,” Sidhwa said on social media this week. “If I had been changing his dressings, as I planned to this evening, I probably would have been killed too. Attacking hospitals is a war crime, and it needs to stop.”
Sidhwa is one of several U.S.-based doctors risking their lives in Gaza. In an interview this week with the news outlet Zeteo, Sidhwa said a woman from the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem called him after the bombing of Nasser Hospital to see if he was alive, and he urged diplomats to ask Israel not to bomb the hospital again.
“And I swear to God, she goes, ‘Actually, that’s not our role, sorry,’” Sidhwa said.
Like other international health care workers and human rights groups, Sidhwa said there is no evidence for Israel’s claims that Hamas militants are using medical facilities as cover for militant activity. Israel has consistently claimed its attacks on hospitals are justified, but striking civilian medical infrastructure is a war crime.
“Let us be clear this is not the first attack on hospitals in the Gaza Strip,” said Gulrana Syed, a Chicago-based emergency physician with Health Care Workers for Palestine, at the press conference, pointing out that this particular strike happened to put the lives of U.S. medical workers at risk. Syed said her friend and colleague, Tammy Abughnaim, is still treating patients at Nasser Hospital despite the deadly Israeli strike.
“We know the endangerment of American health care lives in Nasser Hospital is the direct consequence of U.S. lawmakers failing to sufficiently pressure Israel to cease attacks on life-sustaining institutions in Gaza, including hospital, water sanitation facilities and UN agencies,” Syed said.
Syed and other advocates are urging voters to demand their members of Congress to call for an immediate ceasefire and embargo on further U.S. arms transfers to Israel. Asfour said he has been trying to contact his representative in the House, Rep. Sean Casten, but has not heard back.
“Why haven’t you decided to meet with me?” Asfour said. “Why haven’t you asked me how my family is doing? I am your constituent.”
A spokesperson for Casten did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Advocates with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, also called Rep. Bill Foster, a Democrat from Central Illinois, to condemn attacks on civilians and call for a ceasefire. Foster did not respond to requests for comment though he has criticized Netanyahu’s handling of the war in the past.
Sanders’s push to force a vote in the Senate on joint resolutions disapproving of the Trump administration’s latest transfer of bombs to Israel is designed to force debate in Congress, which has largely abdicated its duties for managing overseas military interventions to the executive in recent decades.
In November, Sanders coordinated a similar vote to block the Biden administration from sending $1 billion in tank rounds, mortar rounds and joint direct attack munitions to Israel. The vote overwhelmingly failed, but was still momentous for being the first-ever congressional vote to block weapons to Israel.
Sanders said the U.S. must not continue to supply weapons to the Netanyahu government, which is facing sustained protests by Israelis who say the prime minister is dragging out the genocide on Gaza for personal political reasons instead of securing a deal for a ceasefire and hostage swap with Hamas.
“It is particularly unconscionable while President Trump and Israeli officials openly talk of forcibly displacing millions of people from Gaza to make way for what Trump calls a ‘Riviera,’” Sanders said. “There is a name for such a policy — ethnic cleansing — and it’s a war crime.”
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