US lawmakers should consider conditioning future aid to Israel on its compliance with international humanitarian law, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on Sunday, calling the civilian death toll in Gaza “unacceptable” and “unsustainable.”
“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with U.S. law and international law,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union. “And that will be a conversation we will all be engaged in when we get back to Washington on Monday.”
Murphy’s comments reflect a growing willingness on the part of some Democrats — potentially including President Joe Biden — to discuss attaching strings to the $14.3 billion aid package that Biden is seeking from Congress.
Speaking to reporters Friday, Biden said conditioning aid was “a worthwhile thought.” But he was quick to add, “I don’t think if I started off with that, we’d ever gotten to where we are today. We have to take this a piece at a time.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, in an op-ed in the New York Times on Thursday, called for an end to what he called a “blank check approach” to funding Israel’s security. “The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency,” Sanders said.
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Sunday that the president wasn’t proposing additional restrictions on aid and believed that the temporary cease-fire for the release of hostages held by Hamas, which controls Gaza, showed his diplomacy was working. “And he is going to continue to engage in exactly that kind of diplomacy,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation.
Murphy’s openness to the idea suggests that it might have growing currency in Congress. Murphy sits on the Foreign Relations Committee and is chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Middle East and counter-terrorism. The US Senate is due to return to Washington on Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday break.
“I think that you can defeat Hamas without this level of civilian casualty,” Murphy said. “And so that’s an appropriate discussion for us to have, in part because I really don’t know that it serves Israel’s strategic aims in the long run if Hamas ultimately is given this kind of bulletin-board recruiting material.”
But Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, said US law already requires that recipients of military aid adhere to international law.
“We need to make sure, and our State Department needs to make sure, that any of our aid isn’t used in a way that violates human rights. That’s not just for Israel, that’s around the world,” the California Democrat told ABC’s This Week. “That is the current law. It’s for the State Department to enforce it.”