WASHINGTON, (PIC)
US lawmakers and activists, joined by actor Cynthia Nixon, have launched a five-day hunger strike outside the White House to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
At a news conference on Monday, the activists decried United States President Joe Biden’s role in supporting the Israeli offensive in Gaza and called for an immediate end to the fighting.
The hunger strikers include members of the Congress Wilson Anton of Delaware, Zahran Mamdani of New York, Murray Turner of Oklahoma, Sam Rasoul of Virginia, and Abraham Ayyash of Michigan.
In a news conference in front of the White House, speaker after speaker representing a range of pro-Palestinian and progressive causes lined up to denounce the US president and his senior officials.
Best known for her work in the TV series Sex and the City and her run in the 2018 New York governor’s race, Nixon used her speech at Monday’s event to highlight the carnage in Gaza, including the killings of dozens of journalists and UN workers as well as the destruction of entire neighborhoods.
Introducing herself as “the mother of Jewish children whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors”, she said: “In seven weeks, Israel has killed more civilians on a tiny strip of land than was killed in 20 years of war in the entire country of Afghanistan.
“I’m sick and tired of people explaining this away by saying that civilian casualties are a routine toll of war. There is nothing routine about these figures. There is nothing routine about these deaths.”
The 6,150 Palestinian children recorded as killed represented a higher number of minors than have been killed in two dozen war zones for the whole of 2022, she said. If the bombardment of the past seven weeks continued, Nixon went on, no Palestinian homes would be left standing by Christmas Eve.
