U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz became visibly emotional Monday when she described what she heard and saw on her most recent visit to Israel — just three days after the Hamas attacks that sparked the war in Gaza.
Wasserman Schultz was part of a congressional delegation in the Middle East when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
Despite what she described as State Department resistance, she insisted on traveling to Israel. She and three other members of the delegation spent Oct. 10 in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
“I can’t even begin to describe to you how sickening it was, and horrifying,” Wasserman Schultz said. “It was important for me to be there, not just as a member of Congress who expresses our support, our country’s support for Israel, but as a Jew, as a Zionist, it was just absolutely critical for me to be there.”
Wasserman Schultz, a Broward Democrat, is the first Jewish woman elected to Congress from Florida.
“Obviously that devastating, horrific savage attack was a gut-wrenching punch,” Wasserman Schultz said. “It’s hard to describe the conversations that we had when we got to Israel.”
The lawmakers met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Yair Lapid, military leaders, and affected families. She delivered “the message that we are not going to allow vicious terrorists to end the dream and vibrancy of Israel.”
Wasserman Schultz briefly described the trip as she kicked off a Cancer Survivorship summit she sponsored at Nova Southeastern University on Monday and later amplified on the visit speaking with reporters.
“I have dealt with a lot of difficult deaths and the agony of families and you’ve lost loved ones and not knowing where they were,” said Wasserman Schultz, whose district included Surfside when Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed in 2021, killing 98 people.
She wasn’t prepared for the scope of the attacks on Israel in which at least 1,400 people were killed. (Israel has responded with airstrikes in Gaza that Palestinian health authorities report have killed at least 2,600 people.)
“To see the vicious savagery, the brutality of the atrocities that were perpetrated on Jews in Israel, simply because they are Jewish because the Hamas charter — this vicious terrorist organization exists only to eradicate Israel and to kill Jews — and to be on the ground … the immediate aftermath was so important because it’s one thing to talk about support for Israel, it’s another thing to demonstrate the United States stands with Israel and will not stand idly by and just allow that kind of carnage and viciousness to occur.”
The night before the attacks, Wasserman Schultz was part of a slightly larger delegation that had met with leaders in Saudi Arabia, where she said there was broad optimism about a normalization of relations with Israel and continuation of the Abraham Accords.
“It was very clear that this attack was intended to end the momentum of that peace process, the momentum of that normalization process…. That was absolutely unacceptable to the terrorists whose only mission is to kill Jews, which they did and, and eradicate Israel which they will not do.”
The delegation then traveled to Bahrain and Jordan. She said there was “resistance” from the State Department to some of the lawmakers continuing on to Israel.
“But there was no way that I was going to go back to the U.S. before making sure that I could touch down in Israel and meet with their leadership (and) hear firsthand from families, which we did,” she said. “I will tell you, it just felt so poignant and important to be there in that moment, to be able to express the United States’ solid solidarity.”
Once the House Republican majority elects a speaker and Congress can function again, Wasserman Schultz said there is no doubt money would be appropriated for humanitarian assistance and to replenish Israeli defenses. “Anything that’s going to be necessary to make sure that Hamas can be eradicated, that the threat to, the existential threat to, Israel can be terminated is essential.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman @sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Facebook, Threads.net and Post.news.
