US politics live: Top American senator brands Benjamin Netanyahu ‘a disgusting liar’ over treatment of Gazans

Left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders has branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a disgusting liar”.

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Left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders has branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a disgusting liar” in an extraordinary rant about the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

Mr Sanders, a perennial presidential candidate, was raised Jewish, but now considers himself not to be a part of any organised religion.

“Senator, when you hear the Israeli Prime Minister saying there’s no starvation happening in Gaza, do you believe he’s lying?” CNN host Kaitlan Collins asked Mr Sanders today.

“Of course he’s lying. He is a disgusting liar,” said Mr Sanders.

“Israel had a right to defend itself from the terrible Hamas attack. But I think everybody understands that in the last one-and-a-half years, they have been waging a brutal, horrific, almost unprecedented type of war, not just against Hamas, but against the Palestinian people.

“You got an area territory there of 2.2 million people. They have already killed 60,000. They have injured 140,000, most of whom are women, children, and the elderly.

“They have virtually completely destroyed the entire infrastructure of Gaza, virtually all of the schools, the healthcare system. Over 70 per cent of the housing. The water system. And now, over the last period of time, they have prevented humanitarian aid from coming in. And now there is mass malnutrition, and children are starving to death.”

Mr Sanders said he would be introducing a resolution in the Senate “to basically say we cannot continue to provide military aid to the extremist, racist Netanyahu government that is starving the children”.

Elsewhere, President Donald Trump was asked by reporters to elaborate on why he fell out with the pedophile financier.

He replied that Epstein had been poaching people from his spa at Mar-a-Lago.

“I said ‘out of here’.”

Then asked if one of those people was the late Virginia Giuffre, who worked at Mar-a-Lago and subsequently accused Prince Andrew of sexual abuse (claims he denies) Mr Trump said it was a possibility.

“I think so. He stole her.”

Read on for more updates.

Originally published as US politics live: Top American senator brands Benjamin Netanyahu ‘a disgusting liar’ over treatment of Gazans