Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned on Friday that Israel’s blockade of Gaza had put the territory on the brink of severe famine, saying publicly for the first time that the nation’s wartime actions amounted to an “unfolding genocide.”
In a speech on the House floor, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, forcefully called on President Biden to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel unless and until it begins to allow the free flow of humanitarian assistance into the Gaza Strip.
“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes,” she said. “It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”
The comments were a sharp rhetorical escalation by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party’s left wing, and they illustrated the intense pressure buffeting party officials as they grapple with how to respond to Israel’s war tactics and the deepening humanitarian crisis.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, defying party leaders, has been a proponent of a permanent cease-fire since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and has called for putting conditions on American military aid to Israel. But she had resisted describing the ensuing war, which has killed 30,000 Gazans and left the territory in ruins, as a genocide.
Israel has firmly denied that the term applies, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez indicated in January that she was waiting for the International Court of Justice to render an opinion on a legal designation. Privately, she has expressed concerns to some allies that the highly contentious term would alienate potential supporters of a cease-fire.
Her position put Ms. Ocasio-Cortez at odds with several members of the progressive bloc she leads in the House, including Representative Cori Bush of Missouri. It also made her an unlikely target of some left-leaning activists: This month, a video went viral of protesters confronting her at a movie theater in New York City and demanding that she use the term.
Allies attributed her embrace of the term on Friday to the worsening humanitarian reality on the ground. The United Nations has warned that much of the Gaza Strip and its 2.2 million residents are now at risk of famine and has pressured Israel to let more food cross in via land.
“Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said on Friday. “We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer. Blocking assistance from one’s closest allies to starve a million people is not unintentional.”
The immediate reaction to her comments was muted, especially considering the gravity of her charge and how the congresswoman often inspires opposition on the right. The White House, which had been alerted beforehand about her speech, declined to comment, as did several staunch Democratic allies of Israel.
Mr. Biden and top Democratic leaders have insisted on Israel’s right to defend itself and have shown little appetite for curtailing military aid to the country. On the contrary, the administration is pushing for billions of dollars more in military assistance.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby that has clashed with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, said that accusing Israel of committing genocide was an “obscene perversion of the truth.”
“It is Hamas that has a genocidal goal of destroying the Jewish people, and it is Hamas that is responsible for massive casualties by using Palestinian civilians as human shields,” Marshall Wittmann, the group’s spokesman, said in a statement that did not mention Ms. Ocasio-Cortez by name.
Some antiwar activists praised the speech, but others argued that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was moving too belatedly.
“AOC is 30,000+ deaths too late to this,” Hafsa Halawa, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, wrote on X. “You want congressional heroes, Cori Bush is where you should look.”
The speech came at a precarious moment in the war. Officials fear the situation in Gaza could grow more dire if Israel follows through with an attack on the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where more than a million civilians have sought refuge.
The Biden administration has pushed Israel to forego the attack. And after months of steadfast support for Israel, the president himself has become increasingly outspoken about the humanitarian crisis, introducing a U.N. Security Council resolution this week calling for “an immediate and sustained cease-fire” in Gaza.
The resolution failed, but progressives aligned with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez have taken Mr. Biden’s firmer stance as evidence that their tactics are working.
She sought to increase that pressure on Friday, speaking not through social media or a news interview but a traditional four-minute speech on the House floor.
The remarks came just after the House voted on a $1.2 trillion government funding bill that would temporarily cut off aid to the main U.N. agency that provides assistance to Palestinians. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was among 22 Democrats to vote against the spending plan.
She began her remarks by invoking Mr. Biden’s own words from a 2011 speech when he was vice president, calling him “a decent man.” Mr. Biden said then that stopping genocides was “an achievable goal” while lamenting that too often real action came “too late, after the best and least costly opportunities to prevent them have been missed.”
Echoing those words, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the United States risked repeating past mistakes. She said relatively little about Israel’s bombing campaign or ground invasions, but referred specifically to a Biden administration plan to put a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coastline to ease the transit of goods, warning it would be “too late” to stave off the worst.
“The time is now to force compliance with U.S. law and the standards of humanity,” she said, calling for the administration to “suspend the transfer of U.S. weapons to the Israeli government in order to stop and prevent further atrocity.”
“This is not just about Israel or Gaza,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez added. “This is about us.”
Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.