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US LAWMAKERS URGED TO FOLLOW MERKLEY AND VAN HOLLEN’S LEAD AFTER
SENATORS DENIED ACCESS TO GAZA  
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Jessica Corbett
August 31, 2025
Common Dreams [[link removed]]

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_ CAIR said that they "have taken a bold and necessary step by
confronting the Israeli-manufactured and US-backed humanitarian
calamity in Gaza head-on. Their mission must not stand alone." _

US Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) discuss
their efforts to visit the Gaza Strip in a video filmed at a Jordanian
air force base and posted online August 30, 2025, (Photo by Chris Van
Hollen/X)

 

The largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the United
States is calling on US lawmakers to follow in the footsteps of Sens.
Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, who on Saturday shared a video
about their unsuccessful attempts to visit—or even just fly
over—the Gaza [[link removed]] Strip during
Israel's ongoing assault.

"Sens. Van Hollen and Merkley have taken a bold and necessary step by
confronting the Israeli-manufactured and US-backed humanitarian
calamity in Gaza head-on," the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR) said
[[link removed]]
in a statement late Saturday. "Their mission must not stand alone."

"Israel's barring them entry to Gaza underscores the urgency of taking
decisive steps to end its rampage of death, violence, and
destruction," CAIR continued. "Members of Congress must utilize every
tool—diplomatic, legal, and legislative—to ensure that our
nation's values and laws demand an end to civilian suffering. The
crisis in Gaza is not abstract—it is a matter of life and death. We
call on our representatives to act urgently and courageously."

Merkley (D-Ore.) and Van Hollen (D-Md.) documented their Middle East
trip on social media, sharing updates from a United Nations World Food
Program site [[link removed]] in Israel
[[link removed]]; Kfar Aza
[[link removed]], a kibbutz attacked by
Hamas on October 7, 2023; the Kerem
[[link removed]] Shalom border
[[link removed]] crossing; the illegally
occupied West Bank [[link removed]], where
Palestinians face violence from Israeli settlers and soldiers; and a
Jordanian air force base [[link removed]].

In the air force base video, Merkley and Van Hollen—both members of
the Senate Appropriations and Foreign Relations committees—talk
about their efforts to witness firsthand the sweeping destruction and
famine
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in Gaza at the hands of Israeli forces armed and otherwise supported
by the US government.

Both men have
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repeatedly backed
[[link removed]] Sen.
Bernie Sanders [[link removed]]'
(I-Vt.) resolutions—introduced during both the Biden and Trump
administrations—that would prevent the sale of certain offensive
American weaponry to Israel, as have a growing
[[link removed]] number of
Senate Democrats. The most recent vote was last month, and a majority
of the chamber's Democratic caucus voted in favor.

In addition to reiterating their calls for a ceasefire and the return
of remaining hostages that Palestinian militants took from Israel in
2023, in Saturday's clip, the senators discuss Jordanian airdrops—as
Israel has limited the flow of food and other essentials—and
stressed that, as Van Hollen puts it, "we need to surge humanitarian
aid into Gaza."

"People are starving, and anybody who tells you that people are not
starving in Gaza is lying to you," he continues. "And it's outrageous
that the United States of America, at the UN, was the country that
voted
[[link removed]] no
on a resolution saying that we need to end the manmade starvation in
Gaza. Anyone who denies that is lying to you."

In a separate video, Merkley addresses the dishonesty they have
encountered during their trip. At the Kerem Shalom crossing, they
attended a briefing that Merkley says "was designed to tell us
everything that we would like to hear about the best organized process
for getting aid into Gaza."

"No mention of any obstructions or frustrations," he notes.
"Unfortunately, it didn't reflect reality at all. And that makes it
just extremely difficult to listen to what essentially amounted to
pure propaganda."

At the crossing, they met with representatives from the Gaza
Humanitarian Foundation, the private entity now responsible for
distributing food aid in the strip. Israeli soldiers have killed or
wounded thousands of Palestinians around the four GHF sites, which
have been described
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as "death traps."

In a Friday video, Van Hollen says that he and Merkley "made it clear"
to GHF "that the idea of having only four sites open, mostly in the
southern part of Gaza—and by the way, only three are open
today—that that is just a way to use food for population control
purposes."

"And so, we had a disagreement with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
folks," he adds. "But our goal here today is to be witness to what the
system is, and to make sure that we can try to fix what is clearly a
broken system for everybody, because there are people in Gaza who are
desperately hungry and starving."

The Gaza Health Ministry said
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Saturday that 10 more people had died of starvation, plus 15
Palestinians were killed and over 206 others were injured by Israeli
fire while trying to get humanitarian aid. The agency puts the overall
death toll since October 2023 at 63,371, though experts believe the
true figure is far higher. At least 159,835 Palestinians have been
wounded.

Israel's assault on Gaza has led to a genocide case at the
International Court of Justice and an International Criminal Court
arrest warrant
[[link removed]] for
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces accusations
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that he is dragging out the war in an effort to avoid a corruption
trial in Israel.

_Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common
Dreams._

_Common Dreams is a reader-supported independent news outlet created
in 1997 as a new media model. Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most
important news stories of the moment. Common Dreams free online
journalism keeps our millions of readers well-informed, inspired, and
engaged._

_We are optimists. We believe real change is possible. But only if
enough well-informed, well-intentioned—and just plain fed up and
fired-up—people demand it. We believe that together we can attain
our common dreams._

* Chris Van Hollen
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* Jeff Merkley
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* Gaza
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* Israeli blockade
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