1. United States
2. Va.
3. Letter

I have recently brought attention to a concerning article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that delved into how soldiers in the IDF were told by their higher-ups to indiscriminately fire into crowds of unarmed Gazan civilians. These soldiers, at the risk of receiving backlash, go on to explain how morality has completely collapsed in the IDF and how there is a mentality of there being no innocents in Gaza. This mentality has led to the murder of innocents whose only crime was risking their lives to get a scrap of food for themselves and their families. Now, an article published in Nature titled “First independent survey of deaths in Gaza reports more than 80,000 fatalities” says that the death toll in Gaza from October 2023 up to January 2025 is almost at 84,000. More than half of those people killed were women aged 16-64, children, or people over 65. Most of those deaths were found to be violent. Given that this report only goes to January of this year, it’s not hard to imagine that the true number is significantly higher. I bring this up as a constituent who urges you to support legislation supporting an arms embargo on Israel. Under American and International law, we are not supposed to sell weapons to a country that is taking part in human rights abuses and war crimes. We are not supposed to be aiding a country that has been found by human rights groups to be using hunger as a method of war. Put American interests aside for once and do the right thing, or history will not look kindly upon us all. I fear to say that we will deserve this scorn if humanity fails the people of Gaza and we do not stand up to criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu.