Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton called for the indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians on Sunday, during an interview with Shannon Bream on Fox News.
“As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas—Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend,” Cotton said.
Over the past week, Israel has killed at least 2,800 people and injured nearly 10,000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, in an onslaught of retaliatory strikes after the terrorist group Hamas made a deadly incursion into Israeli territory, killing 1,400 Israelis.
Cotton did not bother to make a distinction between Hamas, the terrorist organization, and the millions of Palestinian civilians who are now facing a humanitarian crisis as Israel denies them food, water, and electricity. Instead, Cotton insisted that Hamas was to blame for the thousands of Palestinians suffering as a result of Israeli bombs.
Cotton explicitly blamed Hamas for the Israeli military’s slaughter of Palestinian children, implying that the terrorist group was trying to force the hand of the United States by causing Israel to commit heinous war crimes. “If Hamas uses schools, and kindergartens, and mosques for military purposes, Israel has every right under the laws of war to strike back,” Cotton said. “It is Hamas that is committing war crimes by using those civilians to create the imagery to try to put pressure on the Biden administration,” he added.
While Democratic support for Palestinians has increased in the face of Israeli aggression, the Biden administration has not signaled much more than sympathy for the Palestinians, and continued to vocally back Israel.
Cotton’s abhorrent call for violence ignores the fact that the Israeli military has previously engaged in disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians, in blatant violation of international law. Most crucially, international law obligations are nonreciprocal, meaning that if one side commits war crimes, that doesn’t mean the other can, according to Sari Bashi, the program director at Human Rights Watch.
More than anything, Cotton’s calls for indiscriminate violence do nothing to wind down a conflict that has already cost thousands of innocent lives and that threatens to expand into a devastating regional war.