Bernie Sanders: “if the Senator had heard my remarks, I talked about the need to release the hostages and I talked about who started the…”

“if the Senator had heard my remarks, I talked about the need to release the hostages and I talked about who started the war, which is the terrorist organization called Hamas, led by war criminals. There is no debate about that. But what the Senator did not tell us is whether or not he thinks it is a good idea for U.S. taxpayers to be spending billions of billions of dollars on an extremist government in Israel whose stated policy is to starve children; whether or not he thinks it is a good idea to cut off all humanitarian aid getting into Gaza right now--no medicine, no clean water, no healthcare facilities open. So the issue is not who started the war. Everyone knows who started the war. The issue is whether you commit war atrocities, criminal war acts by punishing an entire people for the acts of a terrorist organization. Did Israel have the right to defend itself? Yes, nobody denies that. Did it have a right to kill over 50,000 people--60 percent of whom are women, children, and the elderly? No. Did it have a right to injure 112,000 people, to destroy almost every housing unit in Gaza, to bomb hundreds of schools at every university in Gaza? No. Israel had a right to defend itself, but it does not have the right to engage in ethnic cleansing and to starve children. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii. ____________________”