Schumer denounces US anti-Israel protests and calls for ceasefire

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced US protests against Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Gaza and the calls for a “ceasefire” from some of his fellow Democrats during an interview with The Post Sunday – as he and other lawmakers were forced into a Tel Aviv air raid shelter to wait out Hamas rockets.

The New York Democrat said he’d work to ensure that Israel has “everything they need” to “totally eliminate” the terrorist group from the Gaza Strip – adding that he feels “vindicated” in opposing former President Barack Obama’s release of money to Iran in light of Tehran’s aid to Hamas.

“If the threat of Hamas is not eliminated, they will do it again,” Schumer said when asked specifically about House Democrats — including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — calling for a ceasefire following the terror group’s surprise attack on Israel.

The senate leader’s trip came just a week after Hamas launched its stunning unprecedented attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, murdering at least 1,300 people, most of them civilians.

Schumer and the four other senators on the visit heard from relatives of some of the 150 people feared to have been taken hostage by Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory.

“I wish protesters could have listened to the 12 families we had whose people, whose relatives were taken hostage,” Schumer told The Post, referring to pro-Palestinian demonstrators who have taken to the streets in the US – including in New York and Washington DC – to call out Israel’s military response against Gaza.

“Every one, every one of the senators was crying, all the people were crying. And I said, ‘I wish those who think Israel is wrong would just listen to these parents and the anguish they face through a brutal, brutal Hamas,’” he said.

Schumer also said that he’s confident Iran won’t see a penny of the $6 billion in oil revenue that President Biden agreed to unfreeze in August as part of a prisoner swap — after Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal also unfroze billions in funds.

“There’s a great debate whether Iran actually planned this event and pushed Hamas to do it or whether Hamas did it on its own, but that sort of moot because there would be no Hamas without Iran, which funds them and so Iran,” Schumer said.

“One of the reasons I voted against the agreement with Iran under President Obama was it didn’t limit — it didn’t prevent Iran from funding terrorism around the Middle East. I might feel a little bit vindicated.”

Schumer was joined on the trip by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — with the group photographed Sunday in a bomb shelter in response to air-raid warnings caused by Hamas rocket fire from Gaza.

The veteran Democrat, and first Jewish leader of either chamber of Congress, said he had drafted a “long, extensive list” of defensive and offensive weapons that the US could send to Israel to help “vanquish” Hamas.

“I told the prime minister and everybody else we are putting together a big package,” he said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We asked them what their needs were. Some of them are for more Iron Dome stuff. Some of them is for 155 millimeter shells… We’re gonna give them everything they need. We told them we will give them everything they need.”

The senators learned first-hand what Israelis experience when the air raid sirens went off as the delegation was having lunch at a restaurant, Schumer said, adding, “we had all go into a shelter. And everything was all right.”

In addition to hearing from family members of some of the people held captive in Gaza – a group that includes an unknown number of US citizens – the senators met with senior Israeli political leaders, including Netanyahu and opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, Schumer said.

“We sent the message to the Israelis: We have your back. We feel your pain, we ache with you. The United States will stick with you through thick and thin and we met with everyone,” Schumer, who is the highest-ranking Jewish American in the US government, said.

“We met with families who had people who were hostages,” he added. “There was not a dry eye in the house. The horror of knowing your child is in the hands of these brutal vicious terrorists. so horrible.”

Schumer said that he didn’t know exactly how big the military aid package would be, but that it would be “large.”

He wouldn’t say if the funds would be moved more quickly through Congress by severing them from more controversial Biden administration requests for Ukraine war funding.

Asked if the Israel funding will be approved independently of Ukraine aid, Schumer said, “We will figure out the best package to get the aid [to Israel] as quickly as possible and as large an amount as possible.”

One of the reasons for the trip, he said, was to compile “a list of all the things they needed on the military, intelligence and humanitarian front. And we got a long extensive list.”

Schumer repeatedly rebuked critics of Israel’s attacks on Gaza in response to the massacre of civilians in Israel.

“Israel has to totally eliminate — it has to eliminate the threat from Hamas and find the hostages,” he said.

“It’s a difficult job, particularly because Israel is not Hamas and will try to prevent the loss of innocent civilian lives. But they gotta get it done,” he continued. “If Hamas isn’t vanquished, in the Hamas charter, they want to have no Israel. Their view is that they would do to the Jews in the rest of Israel what they did to the Jews along the Gaza Strip.”

Schumer said Israel’s military operation would “be more difficult because they’ll try to minimize the loss of civilian life. But Hamas is getting in the way.”

The Israeli military has urged Palestinian civilians to temporarily relocate to the southern half of the Gaza Strip, and Schumer said Israel was working to get water to the people who had moved there.

“Hamas is shooting at Israeli soldiers as they try to, you know, hook up the water for the people down there,” he said. “People don’t realize how brutal Hamas is.”