(NewsNation) — As President Joe Biden prepares to announce new humanitarian measures to bring food and medicine to the besieged Gaza Strip, he faces criticism from within his base for his support of Israel in the war.
Jaylani Hussein, executive director for the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Minnesota (CAIR-MN), said the humanitarian aid is welcome news, but he’ll believe it when he sees it in action.
“How can we give people food when we’re still killing them? We saw that just a week ago, we saw people who received food aid were shot at,” Hussein said, referencing the crowd of Palestinians who were shot by Israeli soldiers while trying to get food.
Hussein questions whether providing humanitarian aid may be dangerous for Palestinians without a cease-fire in place.
“We know that the Israeli Defense Force has a track record in the last 150 days to shoot at people who are also accessing this food,” Hussein said.
Israel said many of the dead were trampled in a stampede for food and that its troops only fired when they felt endangered by the crowd.
“The starvation (in Gaza) has now reached a level where we are going to see a massive number of people die because they don’t have food on top of the 30,000 that already died through the airstrikes,” Hussein said.
It’s with those numbers in mind that Hussein supports the “uncommitted” protest vote.
“We’re not supporting Donald Trump,” he said. “But I think the message has been very clear: We’ve protested. We’ve marched. Eighty percent of Democrats support a permanent cease-fire. Sixty percent of Republicans support a cease-fire. The majority of America supports a cease-fire. We’re tired of our nation being the lone nation in the world that is allowing this genocide to happen.”
