In Harrowing Speech, AOC Warns the U.S. Is Aiding “Genocide” in Gaza
More than five months into the horrifying conflict, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has finally called Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide.
On Friday, the New York lawmaker echoed language that President Joe Biden used during his vice presidency, reminding the lower chamber that “preventing genocide is an achievable goal.”
“Too often these efforts have come too late, after the best and least costly opportunities to prevent them have been missed,” she said during a harrowing speech on the House floor.
“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door. A famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government,” she continued.
“This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated, following the killing of another 30,000, 70 percent of whom were women and children,” she said. “There is hardly a single hospital left. And this was all accomplished, much of this accomplished, with U.S. resources and weapons.”
“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes,” she added. “It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away. It looks like good and decent people who do nothing or too little too late.”
There is no world in which the forced famine of 1.1 million people cannot be considered genocide. And that is exactly what we are watching unfold in Gaza now.
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) March 22, 2024
We must enforce U.S. laws and halt weapons transfers to the Israeli government to stop an atrocity in the making. pic.twitter.com/N40Jk3yKc7
Also on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez voted against a $1.2 trillion federal funding package that will gut U.S. funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which sends aid to Palestine. On Thursday, she called the cuts “unconscionable” and “highly political.”
Friday also saw another failed vote at the United Nations Security Council supporting an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The resolution was the first one proposed by the U.S. calling for an immediate cease-fire, even if it wasn’t legally binding. Ultimately, the effort was torpedoed by Russia and China.
Last week, a cohort of senators in the Democratic caucus called on Biden to immediately suspend military aid to Israel so long as the Western ally continued to block humanitarian aid efforts into a starved Palestine.
More than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, in which Israel has weaponized mass starvation as well as blocking or destroying access to critical resources such as water, food, fuel, electricity, and medical aid.