Senate Democrats debated placing conditions on aid to Israel after a group of members demanded the U.S. ally change how it prosecutes its war to dismantle Hamas inside Gaza.
Members raised their concerns about Israel’s bombing campaign and the more than 13,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza at a Tuesday luncheon, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) described afterward as the latest in a series of discussions on the topic.
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“There are different views on that, and we’re going to have to have a discussion with the caucus and the administration,” Schumer said, declining to offer his personal views on the subject as the highest-ranking Jewish official in the federal government. Still, he did not rule out the possibility of conditioning the aid, which will be packaged alongside assistance for Ukraine and Taiwan along with a border measure.
At least three Senate Democrats have called for the United States to take some type of action to pressure Israel to change its strategy in the last week, prompting the meeting. Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have separately called for conditioning aid, while Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) has urged Israel not to resume its bombing campaign in Gaza.
“I support Israel aid. I always have,” Welch told reporters after the meeting. “My big issue — it’s not with Israel aid. It’s with the Israel bombing. It is having such a devastating impact on the civilians.”
Welch said he was supportive of Iron Dome funding and humanitarian aid, but he was not in favor of sending additional bombs without conditions in place to ensure weapons are being used in accordance with international law. He also pushed back on the debate being centered on conditions, which he described as “sort of walking around the edges of what the real challenge is here.”
Despite the concerns, Welch predicted that “at the end of the day, Israel is gonna get the aid.”
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) made a similar prediction while leaving the luncheon, telling reporters that he did not see Israel aid being held up over the dispute, though he did expect it to “be vigorously debated.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), meanwhile, said that the conference is “building a package and we’re trying to accomplish a couple of goals, which is [to] enable Israel to defend itself against Hamas but also make sure that adequate humanitarian aid is being delivered and civilian suffering is being minimized. And so we’re just trying to balance those priorities.”
It is unclear if Murphy, Sanders, and Welch have other colleagues in their corner, though a large part of shoring up support will entail defining what conditions actually mean in this circumstance.
“Conditions is a weird thing,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) said Tuesday. “Nobody’s really sure what they mean by that. It could be a reporting requirement; it could be a normal standard requirement for foreign military financing.”
“Depending what those conditions are. I mean, following international laws is pretty basic,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) told the Washington Examiner when asked if he’d support conditions on aid to Israel. “But if it goes further than that, it can be challenging.”
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The meeting came hours after Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) jointly hosted a screening of a 46-minute compilation of video footage of the Hamas terror attack last month. It also came the day after senior officials with the Israel Defense Forces briefed a group of about a dozen Senate Democrats on their military strategy.
Rosen, a former synagogue president, told reporters outside the viewing, “It’s important that we see it now in real time because Hamas has vowed to repeat this day over and over, over and over, and there were over 1,000 people massacred.”
