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u.s. congress
Sanders Slams 'War Criminal' Netanyahu Ahead of New Meeting With Trump to Plan Gaza Ethnic Cleansing
The progressive senator underscored that the Israeli leader has been indicted by the International Criminal Court "for overseeing the systematic killing and starvation of civilians in Gaza."
Jul 08, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday as the fugitive from the International Criminal Court met with lawmakers ahead of a second White House meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump to advance plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the embattled Gaza Strip.
"As President Trump and members of Congress roll out the red carpet for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, let's remember that Netanyahu has been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court for overseeing the systematic killing and starvation of civilians in Gaza," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement.
"This is the man Trump and Congress are welcoming this week: a war criminal who will be remembered as one of modern history's monsters," the senator continued. "His extremist government has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians and wounded almost 135,000, 60% of whom are women, children, or elderly people. The United Nations reports that at least 17,000 children have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded. More than 3,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated."
"At this moment, hundreds of thousands of people are starving after Israel prevented any aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months," Sanders noted. "In the last six weeks, Israel has allowed a trickle of aid to get in, but has tried to replace the established United Nations distribution system with a private foundation backed by security contractors. This has been a catastrophe, with near-daily massacres at the new aid distribution sites. In its first five weeks in operation, 640 people have been killed and at least 4,488 injured while trying to access food through this mechanism."
Trump and Netanyahu—who said Monday that he nominated the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize—are expected to discuss ongoing efforts to reach a new deal to secure the release of the 22 remaining Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, as well as plans for giving Gazans what the prime minister described as a "better future" by finding third countries willing to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians.
Critics said such euphemistic language is an attempt to give cover to Israel's plan to ethnically cleanse and indefinitely occupy Gaza. Observers expressed alarm over Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz' Tuesday affirmation of a plan to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp at the southern tip of the strip.
"There is no such thing as voluntary displacement amongst a population that has been under constant bombardment for nearly two years and has been cut off from essential aid," Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the advocacy group Refugees International and a former senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Reuters.
Most Palestinians are vehemently opposed to what they say would amount to a second Nakba, the forced displacement of more than 750,000 people from Palestine during and after the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel.
"This is our land," one Palestinian man, Mansour Abu Al-Khaier, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. "Who would we leave it to, where would we go?"
Another Gazan, Abu Samir el-Fakaawi, told the newspaper: "I will not leave Gaza. This is my country. Our children who were martyred in the war are buried here. Our families. Our friends. Our cousins. We are all buried here. Whether Trump or Netanyahu or anyone else likes it or not, we are staying on this land."
Officials at the United Nations—whose judicial body, the International Court of Justice, is weighing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and supported by around two dozen countries—condemned any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
"This raises concerns with regards to forcible transfer—the concept of voluntary transfers in the context that we are seeing in Gaza right now [is] very questionable," Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday.
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The Supreme Court Has Effectively Resuscitated Dred Scott
By choosing to ban nationwide injunctions in response to a case challenging Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship, the court’s conservative majority put all of our rights at risk.
Jul 02, 2025
The 14th Amendment guarantees that all children born in the United States are citizens. It aimed to undo the notorious Dred Scott ruling, which held that some people born here—Black people, to be precise, free and formerly enslaved—nevertheless were not citizens. As you’ll recall, just hours into his term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship. The order was, and remains, unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court chose this case, out of all the possible cases, to strip judges of a key power used to stop illegal actions.
Instead of ruling on the merits in Trump v. CASA, the justices chose to rule on the legality of universal injunctions, among the strongest tools that lower courts use to block flagrantly unconstitutional policies like these from taking effect while cases play out. These injunctions grant relief not only to the person who brought a lawsuit, but to all affected by the ruling. Instead of every soon-to-be parent affected by the order having to bring a lawsuit to secure citizenship for their baby, only one litigant would have to obtain a universal injunction—guaranteeing relief from an unconstitutional order for all. The six justices of the conservative supermajority decided that such rulings go beyond the power of federal courts when they’re not necessary to give the plaintiffs themselves full protection of the law.
While this Supreme Court may be frozen in 1789, we must think anew and act to ensure the protection of birthright citizenship and so many other constitutionally recognized rights.
By allowing Trump’s order to partially take effect in 30 days absent further action by the lower courts, the court has effectively resuscitated Dred Scott, at least for some people, at least for now.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned, “No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
We at the Brennan Center are still analyzing the ruling. It’s vague at key points. In some respects, it is as great a gift to executive overreach as last summer’s ruling on presidential immunity. On the other hand, alternative avenues to obtain nationwide relief from illegal conduct remain.
Let me share several thoughts.
First, and most obviously: This is one more example of the Supreme Court enabling executive overreach at a time when checks and balances are profoundly strained.
These nationwide injunctions pose complex issues. I have warned about the damage a single judge can do with a gavel and a grudge. Nationwide injunctions blocked key Biden administration initiatives, such as on student loan relief and climate change, and many of Trump’s actions in his first term. Oddly, the Supreme Court had never before ruled on the practice, despite many opportunities to do so during the Biden administration. One could have imagined a decision now that set out sharp limits. Instead, with this decision, these justices have once again gone much further than the case required.
Second, the court purports to give litigants other ways to broadly challenge illegal actions—but these may be flimsy, even sneaky. People can file a class action lawsuit, for example. Maybe. I was a class action plaintiffs lawyer before I came to work at the Brennan Center. Those lawsuits are cumbersome, expensive, and slow, and they must overcome barriers erected by very conservative judges (and the business lobbyists who backed them for their jobs).
Then there is the question of which judges have had their power stripped. The ruling seems to apply only to lower court judges... but does it? For example, if the administration were to defy the Supreme Court, would the court itself still have the legal authority to enforce its own orders to protect everyone affected? That would, after all, require a universal injunction.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion, which sought to reassure: Of course the Supreme Court could still take bold action when needed. Some read that as reassuring. Others note that he is just one justice. There’s a reason this appears in a concurring opinion. Kavanaugh may not have been able to bring any of his supermajority colleagues along with him. Even if true, as Ruth Marcus explained in The New Yorker, that means the court “sided with Donald Trump over the judiciary.”
All of which brings us to the third point: The courts, alone, will not save us. In banning universal injunctions, the Supreme Court relied on an originalist interpretation of the Judiciary Act of 1789. (Sotomayor noted that it amounted to “freezing in amber the precise remedies available.”)
Congress, in other words, wrote the law being interpreted—and could write a new law to clarify what powers federal judges hold when confronted by executive branch lawlessness.
Presidents of both parties have pushed to expand their power, though none as brazenly as Trump. And Congress has settled into torpor, failing over and over to perform its constitutional role.
After this period of institutional demolition will come a moment of reform and renewal. When it does, we should ensure that remedies make it possible to hold lawless presidents accountable, along with addressing issues such as campaign finance and voting rights.
While this Supreme Court may be frozen in 1789, we must think anew and act to ensure the protection of birthright citizenship and so many other constitutionally recognized rights. In the meantime, we must give our full support to efforts to hold this administration accountable through the courts, using any and every tool that remains.
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'We Cannot Be Silent': Tlaib Leads 19 US Lawmakers Demanding Israel Stop Starving Gaza
"This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help."
Jun 30, 2025
As the death toll from Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians continues to rise amid the ongoing U.S.-backed genocidal assault and siege of the Gaza Strip, Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Monday led 18 congressional colleagues in a letter demanding that the Trump administration push for an immediate cease-fire, an end to the Israeli blockade, and a resumption of humanitarian aid into the embattled coastal enclave.
"We are outraged at the weaponization of humanitarian aid and escalating use of starvation as a weapon of war by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people in Gaza," Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—and the other lawmakers wrote in their letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "For over three months, Israeli authorities have blocked nearly all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, fueling mass starvation and suffering among over 2 million people. This follows over 600 days of bombardment, destruction, and forced displacement, and nearly two decades of siege."
"According to experts, 100% of the population is now at risk of famine, and nearly half a million civilians, most of them children, are facing 'catastrophic' conditions of 'starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels,'" the legislators noted. "These actions are a direct violation of both U.S. and international humanitarian law, with devastating human consequences."
Gaza officials have reported that hundreds of Palestinians—including at least 66 children—have died in Gaza from malnutrition and lack of medicine since Israel ratcheted up its siege in early March. Earlier this month, the United Nations Children's Fund warned that childhood malnutrition was "rising at an alarming rate," with 5,119 children under the age of 5 treated for the life-threatening condition in May alone. Of those treated children, 636 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, the most lethal form of the condition.
Meanwhile, nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 others have been injured as Israeli occupation forces carry out near-daily massacres of desperate people seeking food and other humanitarian aid at or near distribution sites run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Israel Defense Forces officers and troops have said that they were ordered to shoot and shell aid-seeking Gazans, even when they posed no threat.
"This is not aid," the lawmakers' letter argues. "UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has warned that, under the GHF, 'aid distribution has become a death trap.' We cannot allow this to continue."
"We strongly oppose any efforts to dismantle the existing U.N.-led humanitarian coordination system in Gaza, which is ready to resume operations immediately once the blockade is lifted," the legislators wrote. "Replacing this system with the GHF further restricts lifesaving aid and undermines the work of long-standing, trusted humanitarian organizations. The result of this policy will be continued starvation and famine."
"We cannot be silent. This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help," the lawmakers added. "We demand an immediate end to the blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry into Gaza, the restoration of U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting cease-fire. Any other path forward is a path toward greater hunger, famine, and death."
Since launching the retaliatory annihilation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed at least 56,531 Palestinians and wounded more than 133,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which also says over 14,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Upward of 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, often more than once.
On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated a call for a cease-fire deal that would secure the release of the remaining 22 living Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas.
In addition to Tlaib, the letter to Rubio was signed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Henry "Hank"Johnson (Ga.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Mark Pocan (Wisc.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Paul Tonko (N.Y.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.).
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