Updated at 7:49 p.m.
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., on Tuesday called for an indefinite cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, which has raged in the Middle East for nearly two months.
“Hamas is the enemy, not the Palestinians,” Welch told VTDigger in a Tuesday night interview after announcing his reversal earlier that afternoon. Welch is the third U.S. senator to call for a cease-fire, his office confirmed Tuesday, following U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both Democrats.
With Welch’s call for a cease-fire on Tuesday, and that of U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., earlier this month, Vermont’s senior senator and progressive firebrand, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is the sole member of the state’s congressional delegation who has yet to make such a declaration.
Sanders’ office said it could not respond to a request for comment before publication of this story Tuesday night.
Since the war’s early days, Welch maintained that Israel had a right to defend itself, but urged the country to focus its retaliation against Hamas for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis and captured hundreds more as hostages.
Welch repeatedly called upon the Israeli government to resist acts of collective punishment against innocent Palestinians — an international war crime — and pushed for the U.S. government to supply humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip as the Israeli Defense Force subjected civilians to air strikes, forced evacuation and a ground invasion, as well as cut off civilians’ supply of food, water and electricity. According to the Washington Post, more than 13,300 Gazans have been killed in recent weeks.
A temporary and fragile cease-fire has held since Friday. Welch previously stopped short of calling for it to continue indefinitely, but changed course on Tuesday. He told VTDigger that the temporary cease-fire’s goals were limited in scope — namely, to negotiate the release of Israeli hostages and deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians — but thus far, it has been successful. “Why not try to keep that success going?” he said.
Calling the temporary cease-fire the “first glimmer of hope we’ve had” since the conflict broke out on Oct. 7, Welch said it was the efficacy of this pause in fighting, as well as the halt in civilian casualties, that pushed him to call for an indefinite cease-fire.
“I believe that continuing, the status quo, the cease-fire, creates opportunities for a better resolution than will come out of endless bombing,” Welch said.
He also worried aloud about the potential civilian toll should Israel resume its bombing campaign and target southern Gaza, where thousands of Palestinian civilians were forcibly evacuated.
“If the bombing campaign moves to the south, all those Palestinians who moved on the advice of the Israelis now are under more bombs,” Welch said. “You’re just going to see an intensification of the humanitarian catastrophe. It will stop the capacity of the (United Nations) to continue delivering aid. So that’s a real concern for me: What happens if the bombs resume?”
Welch also on Tuesday mourned the war’s impact felt across the world — and pointed to a shooting that took place over the weekend in Burlington, where three young Palestinian-American students were wounded in an act of violence being investigated as a possible hate crime.
“The impact of the conflict in the Middle East has reverberated across the world, and we’ve seen the effects here at home in the form of Islamophobia and antisemitism,” Welch said in his Tuesday afternoon statement breaking the news of his call for a cease-fire. “This cycle of fear, intimidation, and violence must end.”
