WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – Rights advocates in the United States have condemned a recent visit to the U.S. capital by Zionist war minister Benny Gantz, renewing their calls for an end to unconditional U.S. military aid to the occupying regime.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters last week that the Zionist regime would be requesting $1bn to “replenish” its Iron Dome missile system, as well as buy munitions for the regime’s air force, in the aftermath of 11 days of aggression against Palestinians in Gaza.
The occupying regime’s bombardment of the besieged Palestinian territory killed 253 Palestinians, including 67 children, and displaced at least 58,000 Palestinians.
“The State Department is already trying to rush through $735m in additional weapons sales on top of the annual $3.8bn American taxpayers provide Israel every year,” Mohamad Habehh, a national development coordinator with American Muslims for Palestine, told Al Jazeera.
“To come to the United States and ask for another $1bn after the wholesale destruction of Gaza, after the murder of over 60 children, is unfathomable.”
Reports of a meeting between Gantz and US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on Thursday morning did not indicate whether the regime’s expected request for $1bn in military aid had been made formal.
“American tax money should not be spent financing apartheid and ethnic cleansing, especially when there’s so much need right here in the United States,” said Habehh.
“So you give a few million dollars to Palestinians for humanitarian aid, but then you sell hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to the regime that is oppressing them?” said Laura Albast, a Palestinian-American activist with the Palestinian Youth Movement who attended a demonstration outside the White House against Gantz’s visit and the expected aid request on Thursday afternoon.

Belfast Urges Expulsion of Zionist Envoys

In another development, the City Council of Belfast in Northern Ireland has approved a motion calling on the governments of the UK and Ireland to expel the Zionist ambassadors over the occupying regime’s crimes against the Palestinians.
The document, passed with votes from left-wing parties, urged Belfast municipality to call on London and Dublin “to expel from office Israeli ambassadors, with immediate effect.”
Speaking at the voting session, Socialist councilor Fiona Ferguson said, “I think the expulsion of ambassadors is a first step – a preliminary step – to greater action, but it’s an incredibly important and symbolic step.”
Ferguson, who has tabled the motion, demanded that the UK and Ireland lead by example and answer “the call from Palestinians across the world who have asked for ambassadors to be expelled.”
The resolution states that the Zionist regime’s aggression against Gaza amounts to the “ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” and that the regime’s “illegal settlement expansion, represents flagrant breaches of international law.”
It further says normal cooperation with the occupying regime is “untenable” at a time when “a growing list of human rights organizations has determined that Israel’s actions amount to apartheid.”