Airman takes leave to conduct a protest after Veterans group encouraged dying for the cause

A senior airman on active duty was approved for leave to conduct a hunger strike to highlight the plight of starving children in Gaza.

26-year-old Larry Herbert, a member of Veterans For Peace, was authorized to take leave from his assignment at Naval Station Rota, Spain to participate in demonstrations demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and to visit Congressional offices to press for stopping weapons shipments to Israel.

Hebert said, “I was deeply touched when I saw that Aaron Bushnell took his own life at the Israeli Embassy for the people of Gaza and knew that I had to raise my voice in opposition to the U.S. government supplying Israel the bombs and rockets to commit genocide in Gaza.”

Veterans for Peace commended the actions of Bushnell and encouraged fasting to death in protest of the war in Gaza in a statement issued at the end of February.

“Few who care deeply will have the courage to fast to the death or do what Aaron Bushnell did,” they stated. “But in addition to whatever inadequate things we already do, we can, we must, do two more things.”

They encouraged citizens to call policymakers “madmen arsonists because they go around the globe setting fires much faster than we can extinguish them.”

“They as much as lit the match for Aaron Bushnell,” they wrote. “The fire that killed Airman Bushnell was simply the “collateral damage,” as it’s so callously called, of the ongoing conflagration in Palestine.”

A report from last month stated that all of Gaza’s people face high levels of acute food insecurity.

“The situation in Gaza is catastrophic,” said the report. “Famine is projected and imminent in the northern governates and there is a risk of Famine across the rest of the Gaza Strip.”

After five months of Israel’s bombing and ground war, 32,600 people have already been killed and 1.7 million of the territory’s residents are displaced.

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