Washington, D.C. – Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley—the first Senator to call for a lasting ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict and a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—issued the following statement after a global hunger monitoring authority sounded the alarm on the ‘worst-case scenario of famine’ unfolding in Gaza:
“Gaza is starving, and we must not look away. It’s not starving because of a natural disaster—it’s starving because of a man-made disaster.
“People are starving in Gaza because the Netanyahu government continues to violate international humanitarian law by using food—more precisely the denial of food—as a weapon of war against civilians living in Gaza. We have a profound moral responsibility to end this collective punishment of innocent civilians.
“In January 2024, 19 months ago, I met with doctors who had been working in a hospital in Gaza, and they told me that they could set the broken bones, but they couldn’t provide the nutrition that their patients needed to recover. There was insufficient food 19 months ago!
“In partnership with my colleagues, I called for the previous administration to immediately launch Operation Gaza Relief. We pushed for America to use maximum pressure to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, and that if Netanyahu didn’t get it done, we needed to get it done by using our sea-lift capability and stationing our hospital ships off the shore.
“We had to act so we would not be complicit in the starvation in Gaza. Now, every moment the U.S. fails to demand a massive influx of food or to provide that massive influx of food ourselves, we are complicit in Netanyahu’s strategy of starving Palestinians. This breaks every moral code and every religious code.
“Until every child and every mother have sufficient nutrition, America should not send a single dollar or a single bomb to Netanyahu’s government. No more bombs. More aid.”
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