The material released in Common Dreams under the title ‘How long can US legislators ignore these images of child massacres in Gaza?’, questioning the passivity and inaction in the Capitol in the face of crimes in the besieged coastal enclave.
What has happened in Gaza in the last 11 months has been described as the first genocide broadcast live in the world.
The testimonies in images give proof: Children with limbs amputated by Israeli explosives, desperate mothers holding their dead babies, corpses after corpses unearthed from mass graves are easily available, and sometimes seem inevitable, the text commented.
Members of Congress “have seen many of the same photos and videos as much of the American public, a majority of whom support halting U.S. arms sales to the Israeli government until the attack is over,” he stressed.
“Why do so many American lawmakers and political leaders, including President Joe Biden, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, and Republican nominee Donald Trump, continue to support the war, despite readily available visual evidence of the immense suffering it has caused?” the author mused.
In addition to the catastrophic physical toll of the Israeli assault, the war has inflicted what one Gaza mother called “complete psychological destruction” on the enclave’s children, an impact that will reverberate for generations.
Faced with evidence of these atrocities, Republican lawmakers have chosen to adopt explicitly genocidal stances while attempting to excuse Israeli war crimes by pointing to the surprise attack by the Palestinian Hamas movement on October 7.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told voters during an event in March that the U.S. “should not spend a dime on humanitarian aid” for Gaza and that “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” Common Dreams recalled.
When asked in January by Medea Benjamin of the peace organization CodePink if he had “seen the pictures of all the babies killed” in Gaza, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) replied, “These are not innocent Palestinian civilians,” he added.
According to the writer, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have paid lip service to the suffering of ordinary Gazans while refusing to support an arms embargo against Israel.
That should be a policy shift that advocates say is necessary to pressure Israel’s hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire deal and release those held by Hamas.
“What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating,” Harris said in March, before becoming the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential candidate.
During her speech last month accepting the Democratic nomination, Harris used the passive voice to denounce “what has happened in Gaza.”
The Democratic candidate lamented that “the magnitude of the suffering is heartbreaking,” as if it were caused by a natural disaster and not by deliberate political decisions by Israel and its main ally and arms supplier, the United States, Common Dreams said.
More than 41,000 Palestinians have lost their lives and 94,925 have been injured by Israeli fire in the coastal strip in the past 11 months, according to statistics from Gaza health sources.
ef/ro/dfm
