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Ben Cohen, co‑founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and a longtime progressive activist, told AFP that he was speaking for millions of Americans outraged by the “slaughter” in Gaza after being removed from a US  Senate hearing on Wednesday.

Cohen, 74, was among a group of seven protesters who startled Health Secretary  Robert F Kennedy Jr. by interrupting his testimony about his department’s budget proposal.

Shouting that “Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the US,” — the health insurance programme for low‑income families. The businessman and philanthropist was placed in handcuffs by Capitol Police.

The group was arrested on charges of “crowding, obstructing or incommoding”, assault of a police officer or resisting arrest, US Capitol Police said in a statement, per Al Jazeera. Police said Cohen was only charged with crowding, obstructing or incommoding, a misdemeanour punishable by 90 days in jail, a $500 fine, or both.

He urged senators to press Israel to let food reach “starving kids” as he was led away. “It got to a point where we had to do something,” Cohen said in an interview after his release, calling it “scandalising” that the US approved “$20 billion worth of bombs” for Israel even as social programmes are squeezed back home.

“The majority of Americans hate what’s going on, what our country is doing with our money and in our name,” he said.

US public opinion toward Israel has become increasingly unfavourable, especially among Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center Poll last month.

Beyond the spending, Cohen framed the issue as a moral and “spiritual” breach.

“Condoning and being complicit in the slaughter of tens of thousands of people strikes at the core of us as far as human beings and what our country stands for,” he said, pointing to the fact that the United States pours roughly half its discretionary budget into war‑related spending.

“If you spent half of that money making lives better worldwide, I think there’d be a lot less friction.”

Invoking a parenting analogy, he added: “You go to a three-year-old who goes around hitting people and you say ‘Use your words.’ There are issues between countries but you can work them out without killing.”

A longtime critic of Israeli policy, Cohen last year joined prominent Jewish figures in an open letter opposing the pro‑Israel lobby AIPAC. “I understand that I have a higher profile than most people and so I raise my voice, it gets heard. But I need you and others to understand that I speak for millions of people who feel the same way.”

In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier this month, Cohen, who is Jewish, said the US had a “strange relationship” with Israel that involved Washington “supplying weapons for its genocide.”

“Right now, what it means to be American is that we are the world’s largest arms exporter, we have the largest military in the world, we support the slaughter of people in Gaza,” Cohen said. “If somebody protests the slaughter of people in Gaza, we arrest them. What does our country stand for?”

In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would no longer allow its Israeli licensee to sell its ice cream in the West Bank and Gaza, saying that doing so would be “inconsistent with our values.”

Later, Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit accusing Unilever of firing chief executive David Stever over his support for the brand’s “social mission”.

More than 51,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its war, following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks. Gaza is at “critical risk of famine,” with the entire population facing a food crisis after more than two months of an Israeli aid blockade, and 22 per cent facing a humanitarian “catastrophe,” a UN-backed food security monitor warned this week.