Looming Famine In Gaza, Biden Administration’s Response To Israel-Hamas War: Rep. AOC

Ocasio-Cortez Delivers Floor Remarks on the Looming Famine in Gaza and Biden Administration Response

Editor’s note: Staten Islander News has previously reported on the airdrops of humanitarian food aid ordered by President Biden and carried out by the US military, as well as on the construction of an emergency port in Gaza to allow more humanitarian aid to flow into the area. This port is likely to take several weeks to construct.  

REPRESENTATIVE ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ:

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I know a man, a decent man, who said that “preventing genocide is an achievable goal, a goal that requires a level of government organization and engagement that matches in its intensity the brutality and efficiency required to carry out mass killing. Too often, these efforts have come too late, after the best and least costly opportunities to prevent them have been missed.”

The man that said that was then-Vice President and now President Joseph Biden. And he was right.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to say that such a time is now. 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.

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 killed.

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. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. 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.

It is against United States law to provide weapons to forces who block United States humanitarian assistance. And that is exactly what is happening right now. So much so that the President himself stated, during the State of the Union, that the United States must and will be building its own port to let aid through. It will be too late.

The time is now to force compliance with U.S. law and the standards of humanity. And fulfill our obligations to the American people to suspend the transfer of U.S. weapons to the Israeli government in order to stop and prevent further atrocity.

Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing. We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer. Blocking assistance from one’s closest allies to starve a million people is not unintentional.

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We have a responsibility to prove the value of global democracy, enshrined in the upholding of civil society, rule of law, and commitment to human and civil rights.

This is not just about Israel or Gaza. This is about us. The world will never be the same. And we will never be the same. And we must write our story in this moment, of what it means and who we are as Americans. And our story must be not that we were good men who did nothing. But that we were a committed democracy that did something.

And we must prove that now. With that, I yield back. Thank you.

Banner Image: A group of people standing next to a collapsed building in Gaza.  Image Credit – mohammed al bardawil

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

In January of 2019, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez was sworn-in as the youngest woman and youngest Latina ever to serve in Congress. Her first piece of legislation was the Green New Deal resolution, which envisions a 10-year national mobilization, akin to FDR’s New Deal, that would put millions to work in good-paying, union jobs repairing the nation’s infrastructure, reducing air and water pollution, and fighting the intertwined economic, social, racial and climate crises crippling the country.