Credit: (AP Photos/Jacquelyn Martin)

WASHINGTON — Before the Senate broke for summer recess, Cory Booker, New Jersey’s senior senator, voted to approve the U.S. sale of 201 bombs that weigh 1,000 pounds apiece to Israel.

Booker also voted to approve the sale of 4,799 different 1,000-pound bombs, 5,000 guidance kits to make bombs more accurate and 20,000 assault rifles meant for the Israel National Police.

Nearly two years into Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, wounded more than 143,000 and displaced millions, blocking these sales would limit U.S. options to end the war, Booker said.

Booker last week voted against two resolutions which Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders forced to full chamber votes as images of emaciated children in Gaza and swarms of people clambering for food ricocheted around the world.

Credit: (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)

The resolutions “would restrict our country’s ability to provide future security guarantees without achieving the goal of ending this war now or increasing vital humanitarian aid,” Booker said in a statement.

Since the Hamas Oct. 7 attack

Since the militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage, Booker has consistently voted to approve military and weapons packages destined for Israel.

In January 2024, he voted to table a congressional request of the State Department for an investigation about possible human rights abuses in Israel.

 ‘All the food assistance is there, it’s just a matter of will to let it go in.’ — U.S. Sen. Andy Kim

A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Booker has voted seven times during this Congress and the previous Congress to approve weapons sales to Israel.

Booker’s office did not provide on-the-record responses to questions from NJ Spotlight News, including a question asking if Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A spokesman provided a list of steps Booker has taken about violence in the region, including mention of legislation he introduced Monday to limit violence carried out against civilians in the West Bank region.

Kim’s focus

New Jersey’s other senator, Andy Kim, has voted four times since he became a senator in December 2024 to block weapons sales from the U.S. to Israel, including on two resolutions in April to stop weapons transfers and twice on resolutions last week.

“I had a heartbreaking phone call this morning with someone on the ground in Gaza who shared a story about a mother whose children are surviving on a quarter loaf of bread a day each, who herself often goes two-three days without eating,” Kim said in a statement July 30 about his two votes last week in which he called the circumstances in Gaza a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

“The weapons systems in the resolutions would only take us further from the change that is needed and prolong the suffering we witness,” Kim said.

In an interview with NJ Spotlight News the next day, Kim said he was focused on the safety of Palestinians and Israelis, adding that the unfolding hunger crisis in Gaza could spiral further.

“This is something that has the capacity to be just a level of human misery beyond anything we’ve seen so far in this conflict,” Kim said.

Debating genocide

Last year, an independent expert on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, told a United Nations panel in Austria that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, amounted to a genocide — a label Israel rejected as “outrageous.”

Asked by NJ Spotlight News if the war in Gaza constitutes a genocide, Kim demurred.

“I haven’t used that word,” Kim said. “There certainly are atrocities that are happening, and this mass starvation effort is something that I find horrific.”

To define genocide requires certain conditions which vary, depending on the legal jurisdiction in question, but broadly amount to the intent to destroy a particular ethnic, racial, religious or national group.

Support among Americans for Israeli military action in Gaza fell to 32% in July, according to a recent Gallup survey, a new low, while disapproval simultaneously rose to 60%.

A former foreign affairs officer, Kim studied genocide and atrocities in graduate school.

“Having seen how much work goes into this and having studied how important of a word that is, I don’t feel like I’ve done my due diligence from an investigatory standpoint,” Kim said.

That the war crime of starvation is occurring in Gaza is likely, he said.

“I think that that’s very likely that we’ve gotten to that type of place where those types of allegations are legitimate to look into,” Kim said. “From my standpoint, what we’re seeing is very clear, clear starvation.”

“All the food assistance is there, it’s just a matter of will to let it go in,” he said.

Using starvation as a tool of war is a crime under international law.

Watson Coleman says genocide

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12th) is the only member of the New Jersey congressional delegation who has publicly called the war in Gaza a genocide.

Booker and Kim both voted against the confirmation of evangelical politician Mike Huckabee to be U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee was confirmed as ambassador in April.

As of May, the U.S. had provided $174 billion, not adjusted for inflation, in military assistance and “missile defense” funding for Israel, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The U.S. started approving military aid to Israel in 1959. From then until 2024, military aid to Israel reached a total of $251.2 billion, adjusted for inflation, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Joined by left-leaning Democrats, Sanders, who is Jewish, has led the resolutions to restrict arms to Israel. Sanders’ parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and the senator has said his father’s side of the family was “wiped out” during the Holocaust.

Support among Americans for Israeli military action in Gaza fell to 32% in July, according to a recent Gallup survey, a new low, while disapproval simultaneously rose to 60%.

Democrats and political independents are driving that disapproval, Gallup found.

Just 8% of Democrats and 25% of independents approve of Israel’s war in Gaza, Gallup found. By comparison, 71% of Republicans approve.

— Chart by Genesis Obando