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WASHINGTON: Senate Democrats are imploring President Donald Trump’s administration to step up its role in addressing suffering and starvation in Gaza, with more than three dozen senators signing onto a letter Tuesday urging the resumption of ceasefire talks and sharply criticizing an Israeli-backed American organization that had been created to distribute food aid.
In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Republican president’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, the senators said the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, created in February with backing from the Trump administration, has “failed to address the deepening humanitarian crisis and contributed to an unacceptable and mounting civilian death toll around the organization’s sites.”
It marked a mostly united plea from Senate Democrats — who are locked out of power in Washington — for the Trump administration to recalibrate its approach after the collapse of ceasefire talks last week. Trump on Monday expressed concern about the worsening humanitarian situation and broke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that people are not starving in the Gaza Strip. But it is unclear how Trump will proceed.
Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii said it was “not at all credible” to think the Israeli military — one of the most advanced in the world — is incapable of distributing food aid or performing crowd control.
“They made a choice to establish a new way of doing food distribution,” he said. “And it’s not working at all.”
The letter, obtained by The Associated Press, calls for a “large-scale expansion” of aid into Gaza channeled through organizations experienced working in the area. It also says efforts for a ceasefire agreement are “as critical and urgent as ever.”
The message was led by four Jewish members of the Democratic Caucus — Sens. Adam Schiff of California, Chuck Schumer of New York, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Schatz — and calls for the return of the roughly 50 hostages, 20 still believed to be alive, held by Hamas since its Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
The 39 signatures on the letter show the extent to which Democrats have achieved some unity on a foreign policy issue that deeply divided them while they held the White House last year. They called for an end to the war that sees Hamas no longer in control of Gaza and a long-term goal of both an Israeli and a Palestinian state and opposed any permanent displacement of the Palestinian people.
Meanwhile, Republicans are backing Trump’s handling of the situation and supporting Israel. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was satisfied with Trump trying “to referee that, but the Israelis need to get their hostages back.”
Still, images of the worsening hunger crisis in Gaza seemed to be reaching some Republican members of Congress.
Over the weekend, far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who routinely calls for an end to foreign aid, said on social media “what has been happening to innocent people and children in Gaza is horrific. This war and humanitarian crisis must end!”
For Schatz, it was a sign many Americans do care about suffering in other parts of the world, even after Trump won the election with “America First” foreign policy goals and kickstarted his administration by demolishing US aid programs.
“They are seeing images of chaos, images of suffering that are either caused by the United States or at least could have been prevented by the United States,” Schatz said. “And it is redounding negatively to the president.”

FRANKFURT: A Syrian man who allegedly supports the Daesh group has been charged with attempted murder over the stabbing of a Spanish tourist at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The suspect, a refugee partially identified as Wassim Al M., is said to have seriously injured the 30-year-old man at the landmark in the German capital in February.
It was one of a series of attacks blamed on foreign nationals that fueled a bitter debate about immigration in the run-up to Germany’s general election.
The suspect “shares the ideology of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State (IS)” and has “radical Islamist and antisemitic views,” federal prosecutors said in a statement.
He had traveled from the eastern city of Leipzig, where he had been living, to Berlin to target “alleged infidels, whom he regarded as representatives of a Western form of society that he rejected,” prosecutors said.
Shortly before the stabbing, the suspect, who was 19 at the time, sent a photo of himself to IS members so the group could claim responsibility for the attack, they said.
The tourist, from the Basque Country in northern Spain, was wounded in the neck during the attack at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a somber grid of concrete steles located near the Brandenburg Gate and the US embassy.
The suspect, who was arrested shortly after the attack and is in pre-trial detention, has also been charged with causing serious bodily harm and attempted membership of a foreign terrorist organization.
Officials said previously he had arrived in Germany in 2023.
The attack was one of several which shocked Germany ahead of the general election, which saw a doubling in the vote-share for the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The election was won by the center-right CDU/CSU, which has since taken power at the head of a coalition and moved swiftly to introduce stricter curbs on immigration.
The new government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz has signalled it is trying to resume deportations to Syria, which have been suspended since 2012.