Left-wing activists, including Cynthia Nixon, known for her role in Sex and the City, have initiated a hunger strike outside the White House in an effort to urge President Joe Biden to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
The five-day fast began on the anticipated end of a four-day cease-fire in Israel’s military push into Palestinian coastal territory, during which the Palestinian group Hamas released hundreds of hostages. Israel has also freed several Palestinian detainees, the majority of whom are women and youngsters. Following intervention from Egypt and Qatar, the truce was extended for another two days.
In a news conference in front of the White House, speaker after speaker representing a range of pro-Palestinian and progressive causes lined up to denounce the US president and his senior officials. They lambasted the Biden administration for enabling a bombardment and ground invasion that has killed nearly 15,000 people, including more than 6,000 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
“We are taking this action of hunger striking to showcase the actions of President Biden,” said Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic state representative from New York. “It’s President Biden’s actions that are leading to the bombing of Palestinians, the starving of Palestinians. So we are starving ourselves to make visible what is so often erased, which is the Palestinian experience.”
Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, attempted to put the soaring Palestinian death toll in the context of the 20-year US military engagement in Afghanistan while, uniquely among the speakers, also referencing the roughly 1,200 Israelis killed in Hamas’s attack on 7 October that provoked the current hostilities.
Introducing herself as “the mother of Jewish children whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors”, she said: “In seven weeks, Israel has killed more civilians on a tiny strip of land than was killed in 20 years of war in the entire country of Afghanistan.
“I’m sick and tired of people explaining this away by saying that civilian casualties are a routine toll of war. There is nothing routine about these figures. There is nothing routine about these deaths.”
The 6,150 Palestinian children recorded as killed represented a higher number of minors than have been killed in two dozen war zones for the whole of 2022, she said. If the bombardment of the past seven weeks continued, Nixon went on, no Palestinian homes would be left standing by Christmas Eve.
“None of this is normal,” she said.
Referring to Biden, she added: “I would like to make a personal plea to a president who has experienced such devastating personal loss. To connect with an empathy that he has acknowledged and to look at the children of Gaza and imagine that they were his children. We implore him that this current ceasefire must continue.”
Later, in separate comments to the Guardian, Nixon accused the Biden administration of moving “way too slow” to save lives and said Israel was guilty of disproportionality in spreading the consequences of its war against Hamas to the civilian population.
