by Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle
September 2, 2025
A lot has changed in Israel and Palestine since Oregon’s Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley first visited in 1978 as a 21-year-old backpacker.
But the pace of change between his last trip to the region in Jan. 2024 and the present, as Israel wages an ongoing war against the militant and political group Hamas in Gaza, has been unbelievably devastating, Merkley told the Capital Chronicle Sunday morning from Cairo, Egypt, at the end of an eight-day trip to the region.
“There’s a lot that has transpired over those 20 months,” he said. “I don’t think 20 months ago, January 2024, we would have imagined that the war would be ongoing.”
He and U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, returned in late August to Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel, and visited the West Bank and Jerusalem, to monitor the distribution of international aid meant to reach starving Gazans, and to learn more about the ongoing impacts of the nearly two-year war that began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.
Since then, Israeli soldiers have killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government but staffed by medical professionals and considered by the United Nations and other independent experts to be the most reliable source for casualty numbers.
Israeli soldiers have also razed entire cities, leaving most of the remaining population of Gaza today displaced and facing famine. More than half of the Israeli hostages have been released by Hamas or rescued, while more than 80 are confirmed to have died and about 30 who are still being held captive are believed to be alive, according to the Israeli government.
“There has to be an end to this war. The hostages all have to be released. And there has to be massive intervention to address the medical problems and the starvation,” Merkley said.
Merkley, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has called on his colleagues in Congress to halt hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel until Gazans receive immediate and critical aid being blocked by Israeli forces.
He has also, along with Democratic senators, called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East, to resume diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire agreement and end the war.
The U.S. has sent more than $20 billion in weapons and military aid to Israel since Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel
The eight-day trip — including more than two dozen meetings in four settings — began in Israel, where Merkley and Van Hollen met with families of the Israeli hostages, with aid providers from the United Nations World Food Programme and with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
More than 140 Gazans have died of hunger since the start of the war, including 88 children, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures. Most of those deaths were in the last couple months. Between April and July, more than 20,000 children in Gaza were seen by doctors for acute malnutrition, and more than 3,000 of those children were deemed severely malnourished, according to a recent report from The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, a global initiative that provides food security analysis for charities and U.N. agencies.
The senators also talked on the phone with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who holds a largely symbolic role in the government, and met with Greek, Latin and Armenian Catholic church leaders in the Old City of Jerusalem who are calling for an end to the war.
With those church leaders, the senators visited the Kerem Shalom Crossing, a gateway between Gaza and Israel, where they learned about how foreign aid moves from inspection areas in Israel into Gaza, where Palestinian trucks receive it and move it to warehouses, Merkley said.
Van Hollen and Merkley also returned to a kibbutz called Kfar Aza — a sort of intentional community, or commune, centered on egalitarian values and growing food — that they had visited in January 2024, and that was a site of Hamas violence against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
They met with a woman trying to rebuild the kibbutz so people will return over the next year, but so far, only 20 of the former residents have returned, Merkley said. The ongoing war had impacted their host, too.
“She knew many of the people who died and she knew many of the people who were taken hostage from the kibbutz. In fact, she basically knows everybody at the kibbutz,” he said. But from the community, it’s possible to see over the border into Gaza City, Merkley explained. While he and Van Hollen were there, they could hear Israel dropping bombs on Gaza City.
“And she said, as time has passed, her sense has returned of how we have to break this cycle of revenge and we have to find a way for the two peoples — all the Israelis and the Palestinians — to live together peacefully,” Merkley recounted. “But it had been like a long process of grieving and pondering in that regard.”
West Bank
In the West Bank, Merkley and Van Hollen met with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, as well as families of American Palestinians living in the West Bank who have been jailed by Israeli authorities, and who know others who have been jailed or killed by Israeli authorities or Israeli settlers.
They also visited a Christian village in the West Bank that was recently attacked by settlers, Merkley said, noting that Israeli encroachment into Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, and violence from those settlers towards Palestinians, has intensified.
“Almost nothing is done by the Israeli Defense Forces to protect the Palestinian villagers from the settlers,” Merkley said. “Many of the IDF forces that are in the West Bank are settlers themselves, and it’s almost as if the government of Israel has given a green light. They just are not engaged in stopping this escalation of violence, and it’s coming in many forms.”
Gazan borders
The Israeli military barred Merkley and Van Hollen from entering the Gaza strip when they visited in January 2024, but the two were able to go to Rafah Gate, where Egypt borders the southernmost edge of Gaza, to meet doctors and aid truck drivers who painted an early picture of a people beginning to starve.
“One conversation that really sticks in my mind was with two doctors who had just left the European hospital, and one of them was more of a specialist in burns, and the other in broken bones, and one of the doctors said: ‘Of course, we can put an arm in a cast, but our patients need more nutrition in order to recover,’” Merkley recounted. “Well, if you go 20 months forward, that brings us to the current moment. All of those things are true, but at such a higher level.”
Van Hollen and Merkley returned to Rafah Gate on Saturday, still barred from entering Gaza, but able to look out over the city of Rafah from the top of a building.
“We could see absolute rubble, like there was no semblance of a town remaining. It wasn’t like a bunch of buildings with holes in the side — like shell holes and blown holes — No, everything was rubble,” he said. “Now, this same process is beginning in Gaza City, and there are upwards of about a million people in the Gaza City area. And realize, not that many months ago, a million people were in Rafah.”
‘We have our voices’
Merkley said the war is at a desperate moment and a ceasefire is needed to stop the assault on Gaza City, where roughly 1 million Palestinians are facing forcible displacement.
“There are ministers in the (Israeli) Cabinet who have this vision of depopulating Gaza and making it part of a broader Israel,” he said. “But there are many, many Israelis that are fiercely opposed to that vision as well. After all, to depopulate an area in that fashion is a war crime.”
He said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has deeply damaged Israel’s standing in the world, and many Israelis understand this. Thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday demanding an end to the war.
“There’s deep, deep debates going on among the leadership and the people of the State of Israel,” Merkley said.
He returned to the U.S. on Monday and will resume work in Congress on Tuesday. He and Van Hollen have written op-eds and attempted to pass memorandums that would make military aid to Israel dependent on humanitarian aid getting to Gazans, but they’re in the minority in Congress.
Recent polling shows most Americans disapprove of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Merkley said turnout at his 36 town halls this year has been five times what it was in past years, in part because people wanted to tell him to do something to stop the war.
Among the members of Congress who continues to vote in favor of military aid to Israel is Oregon’s senior U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, also a Democrat. Wyden has joined Merkley in calls for a ceasefire and aid to Gazans, but has so far not joined in efforts to end weapons sales. His town halls have also been packed with constituents asking him to stop arming the Israeli military. One recent town hall in Grants Pass was cut short by protests.
Merkley declined to share anything about conversations with Wyden on the topic.
“Feelings are shifting, but there is no magic wand here. There is no ‘Oh, well, just say it louder,’ and somehow you will change the course,’” Merkley said. “You just have to keep pressing with ideas in amendments, and voting (…) and conversations with our colleagues, you keep pressing on everything.”
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