Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley, Democratic senators in the US states of Maryland and Oregon, released on Thursday a report with sharp criticism of both Israel and the US.
That Israel is engaging in ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip is completely obvious, according to the senators. Israel's goal is to destroy and "cleanse" the Gaza Strip of Palestinians by forcing them to flee, they claim.
What they are doing, and what we witnessed, is to put these goals into action, said Van Hollen at a press conference on Thursday according to The Guardian.
Netanyahu's government has gone far beyond attacks on Hamas by collectively punishing the entire population of Gaza.
Deprived of food and water
Van Hollen and Merkley were part of a US delegation that visited Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the occupied West Bank in August. Among other things, they visited the border area with Gaza on the Egyptian side, near Rafah. During Thursday's press conference, they described a dystopian landscape of rubble where the city, previously home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, stood before the war.
In conversations with the senators, former Israeli soldiers are said to have testified about how they participated in the "systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure".
A strategy is to destroy houses so they cannot be returned to. The other is to deprive Palestinians of things essential for life: food, water, medicine, said Merkley on Thursday.
The US is complicit
Both senators accuse the US of being complicit in what they call Israel's ethnic cleansing.
We, the US, are complicit in all of this. We support Netanyahu's government with taxpayer dollars for the weapons they use in Gaza, said Van Hollen.
In the report, Van Hollen and Merkley also accuse Israel of "using food as a weapon" by systematically strangling the flow of aid to the Gaza Strip.
At least 100 Palestinians in Gaza have died as a result of starvation and malnutrition, the UN stated this week, citing local authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza.
