A wave of current and former staff members, mostly of a younger generation, are agitating for a cease-fire and speaking out against their bosses’ positions.

The carnations arrived by the wheelbarrow. Blood-red, pink, orange and yellow, more than 10,000 stems were laid on the steps at the base of the Capitol against a clear blue sky.

Each was meant to represent a civilian life lost in the Israel-Hamas war one month in, encompassing Israeli and Palestinian people alike. They were brought over by more than 100 congressional staff members, all wearing masks to obscure their identities, for a walkout last week honoring the civilians killed in the conflict and calling for a cease-fire and the release of more than 200 hostages abducted by Hamas.

“We are congressional staffers on Capitol Hill, and we are no longer comfortable staying silent,” three of the aides, all of whom declined to give their names, declared, the Capitol dome towering behind them. “Our constituents are pleading for a cease-fire, and we are the staffers answering their calls. Most of our bosses on Capitol Hill are not listening to the people they represent. We demand our leaders speak up: Call for a cease-fire, a release of all hostages and an immediate de-escalation now.”

The walkout was the latest in a series of actions congressional aides have taken, almost all of them anonymously, to publicly urge members of Congress — their own bosses — to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.

As a tense political debate rages across the country and on the Senate and House floors — where elected officials have sparred over emergency aid to Israel, what if any conditions should come with it and even what language is appropriate for the debate — there is a more personal and in many ways more emotionally fraught discussion taking place inside the offices of members of Congress.

The vast majority of lawmakers in both political parties have rejected calls for a cease-fire, saying Israel has a right to go after Hamas after its brutal attack in southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage. A cessation, many of them argue, would only embolden Hamas and allow it to regroup. Israel announced last week that it would institute daily combat pauses to allow civilians to flee and aid to enter Gaza amid skyrocketing civilian casualties and a worsening humanitarian crisis.

But many Democratic congressional staff members, most of them under the age of 35, have found themselves in stark disagreement with their bosses and the Biden administration on an issue that cuts to the heart of their values, according to interviews with more than a dozen aides and strategists, most of whom spoke on the condition that their names not be used for fear of imperiling their jobs and prompting personal attacks.

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Dear President Biden,

We write to you as alumni of your 2020 presidential campaign. We fought tirelessly to organize millions of Americans to cast their votes for you. Like you, we believe in the dignity and value of every human life and the need for moral courage from our country’s leadership. We implore you, President Biden, to live that moral courage right now by stepping up to be a leader we can be proud of in the face of injustice. As President of the United States, you have significant influence in this perilous moment — you must call for a ceasefire, hostage exchange, and de-escalation, and take concrete steps to address the conditions of occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing at the root of the horrific violence we are witnessing now.

We were and continue to be horrified by the devastating Hamas attack against Israeli civilians on October 7. Yet, in this moment of pain, we cannot condemn violence and the murder of some civilians while simultaneously justifying and enabling it for others. Right now, the world is watching in grief and anguish as the Israeli military wields devastating force upon 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. In one month, Israeli forces have killed over 10,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.4 million people from their homes. Over 800 scholars and practitioners of conflict studies, international law, and genocide studies have warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza may constitute genocide. Save the Children estimates that Israel’s bombardment is killing one child in Gaza every 15 minutes. Mr. President, you have spoken intimately about the unbearable pain and grief of losing a child — we were shocked and saddened to see you justify the death of Palestinian children as “the price of waging a war.”

Leading human rights organizations agree that Israel is imposing collective punishment on the two million people in Gaza — half of whom are children — by cutting them off from food, electricity, and water. And now, trapped in constant terror for their lives and families, Palestinians in Gaza are facing an urgent existential threat at the hands of the Israeli military. As Israel imposes a near-total communications blackout, they are losing loved ones, facing mass displacement, and struggling to access vital resources including almost all health care for the wounded.

As you have said, silence in the face of human rights violations is tantamount to complicity. With every passing day, we will continue to see more bloodshed, more war crimes, and more death. All people of conscience must call loudly and vociferously for a ceasefire now. As a person of conscience with enormous influence, you have a special responsibility to lead this call.

We are not alone in this demand. The majority of Americans (66%) and Democrats (80%), are in agreement — a ceasefire is the bare minimum. Across the country, tens of thousands of people are rising up in protest, demanding an end to Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza, and to the United States’ continued support of Israel’s occupation and war crimes. Some of the most vocal critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza are the families of Israelis who were killed or kidnapped by Hamas. They understand the response to one atrocity cannot be another, and that continued bombardment and a ground invasion will not bring justice for those they lost or bring their loved ones home. We should listen to them.

We have been down this road before, and we must not repeat the mistakes of our past. The U.S. response to 9/11, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, entangled us in a decades-long war that killed hundreds of thousands of people as a result. There is no military solution to Gaza. The only way to achieve lasting justice and peace for Palestinians and Israelis is to take concrete steps to end the brutal conditions of apartheid, occupation, and siege that are at the root of the violence we are witnessing now. If you don’t use the tremendous power of your position to call for a ceasefire immediately, we may never get that chance.

President Biden, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is a moment that may very well define your legacy. We trust that you believe all people deserve safety and freedom, which is why we are calling on you to:

1. Publicly call for — and use financial and diplomatic leverage to bring about — an immediate ceasefire;
2. Advocate for de-escalation in the region, including demanding that Hamas release all hostages and that Israel release over 1,200 people in administrative detention — 99% of whom are Palestinians — being held without charge;
3. End unconditional military aid to Israel;
4. Investigate whether Israel’s actions in Gaza violate the Leahy Law, prohibiting U.S. military aid from funding foreign military units implicated in the commission of gross violations of human rights;
5. Take concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this devastation.

There will be no justice, peace, or security for Palestinians or Israelis without dismantling the status quo of the past 75 years. As the President of the United States, you have power to change the course of history, and the responsibility to save lives right now. We are counting on you to take that power and responsibility seriously and to meet this moment with the urgency it demands. If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.

Sincerely,

Biden Alumni for Peace and Justice
A coalition of 500+ former 2020 Biden for President and Democratic Party staff

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If you don’t look too closely you might think the photograph is a dimly lit snapshot from a slumber party or a family camping trip. Six small children lie in a row, their heads poking out from the white sheet that is casually lying across their little chests. None appear to be older than 10, though it is hard to say for sure.

At first, you might not notice the smear of drying blood in the upper right hand corner of the image. But then you do, and then it is impossible not to see that one child, second from the left, appears to be missing a chunk of skull. When you now look with your full attention, the horror of this tableau takes shape, and you see that only one child — a girl with a ponytail, probably 8 or 9 years old — looks even remotely as if she is sleeping. Her head is turned slightly, as if she had been drowsily whispering something to the girl beside her.

Then you might see the terse caption, which reads: “The bodies of children killed in an Israeli strike lie on the floor at the morgue of Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Oct. 22, 2023, as battles continue between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group.” The caption comes from Agence France-Presse; the photo from Mahmud Hams, a staff photographer there.

The children are not named. The photograph tells us nothing about whether or how these children are related. All we can know is that they are six of the more than 4,500 children who have been killed in Gaza, according to its Ministry of Health, since Israel began its military campaign in response to the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. On that day, Hamas fighters slaughtered 1,200 people, among them many children. Hundreds of Israeli hostages, including children, are believed to be held in Gaza by Hamas, their families desperate for their safe release.

This photograph has not been published by a mainstream news organization, so far as I can tell. Because of its graphic nature, The Times has decided not to publish it in full; this column is accompanied by a cropped version of the image. The full image can be seen here. It is a rare thing for mainstream news organizations to publish graphic images of dead or wounded children. Rightly so. There is nothing quite so devastating as the image of a child whose life has been snuffed out by senseless violence. The longstanding norms are to show such images sparingly, if at all.

Of course, the news media no longer needs to disseminate an image for it to be seen. Social media bludgeons us with a flood of brutal images. And in a long reporting career that has taken me to many war zones, I have seen more than my share of death in real life. I’ve gone to these places because I believe deeply in bearing witness to all facets of the human experience, including war and suffering. One of the hardest parts of journalism is witnessing horror and then trying, in words, sound and image, to convey that pain to the wider world. Many people may want to look away, to see the world as they prefer to see it. But what should we see when we see war? What should war demand all of us to see and understand? Given my experience in war zones, it is a rare thing for a violent image to stop me in my tracks. But I believe that this is an image that demands to be seen.

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By Omer Bartov

Mr. Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University.

Israeli military operations have created an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. But are Israel’s actions — as the nation’s opponents argue — verging on ethnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide?

As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.

It is clear that the daily violence being unleashed on Gaza is both unbearable and untenable. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas — itself a war crime and a crime against humanity — Israel’s military air and ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, a number that includes thousands of children. That’s well over five times as many people as the more than 1,400 people in Israel murdered by Hamas. In justifying the assault, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements that indicate a genocidal intent.

Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it.

International humanitarian law identifies several grave crimes in armed conflict. War crimes are defined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent protocols as serious violations of the laws and customs of war in international armed conflict against both combatants and civilians. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, defines crimes against humanity as extermination of, or other mass crimes against, any civilian population. The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

So in order to prove that genocide is taking place, we need to show both that there is the intent to destroy and that destructive action is taking place against a particular group. Genocide as a legal concept differs from ethnic cleansing in that the latter, which has not been recognized as its own crime under international law, aims to remove a population from a territory, often violently, whereas genocide aims at destroying that population wherever it is. In reality, any of these situations — and especially ethnic cleansing — may escalate into genocide, as happened in the Holocaust, which began with an intention to remove the Jews from German-controlled territories and transformed into the intention of their physical extermination.

My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action. On Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a “huge price” for the actions of Hamas and that the Israel Defense Forces, or I.D.F., would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble.” On Oct. 28, he added, citing Deuteronomy, “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”

The deeply alarming language does not end there. On Oct. 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” a statement indicating dehumanization, which has genocidal echoes. The next day, the head of the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such,” he said, adding: “There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

The same day, retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland wrote in the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” He added, “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.” In another article, he wrote that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Apparently, no army representative or politician denounced this statement.

I could quote many more.

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