US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) speaks as House members hold a press conference in Washington, DC, on Sept. 3, 2025. Photo: Josh Morgan-USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) struggled to defend his earlier claims that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza during a new interview. 

While speaking with heterodox podcaster and Free Press columnist Coleman Hughes, Khanna criticized Israel for continuing its military operations in Gaza deep into 2024 in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of the Jewish state, arguing that the Israeli military had already eliminated the vast majority of Hamas battalions earlier in the war. He condemned the humanitarian consequences for civilians.

“I did not think that militarily they could achieve anything more and they should have stopped and they should have engaged in a peace process with the Arab peace plan to try to actually have a non-Hamas Palestinian state with a secure Israel. And they continued, and they continued, and then they ended up killing 19,000 children in Gaza,” Khanna said, citing a statistic used by Hamas-controlled health authorities in the Palestinian enclave. 

Children comprise approximately half of the civilian population of Gaza. Hamas, the terrorist group which governs Gaza, conscripts boys for military service starting as young as 15.

Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication. A key challenge for Israel has been Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.

In justifying his claim of “genocide,” Khanna pointed to reports issued by various United Nations panels which accused Israel of purposefully killing civilians in Gaza. 

“The UN has called it a genocide. I know people don’t like it when I say that, but I would defer to what the UN findings were. And my view is that that Israeli government needs to have accountability for what they did,” Khanna said. 

The United Nations has not produced an official ruling accusing Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. However, various UN-affiliated groups such as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry have produced reports accusing Israel of violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Various experts have disputed the claims outlined by these reports, arguing that they did not identify any intent to eliminate the civilian population and that Israel’s military conduct was aimed at specifically destroying the Hamas terrorist group, which openly seeks to destroy Israel.

Hughes pressed Khanna on how he plans on establishing a Palestinian state with the presence of Hamas considering that the organization still operates in Gaza. 

“How do you negotiate for a non-Hamas Gaza when Hamas hasn’t been destroyed at that point?” Hughes asked. 

Khanna suggested that Israel should have started “negotiating” earlier and that the US and Israel “have saved a lot of lives and they could have saved a lot of their own public opinion had they started negotiating a few months in” with Hamas.

The congressman said that Israel and the US should have agreed to “negotiate for a secure Israel and a Palestinian state,” stating that it would have resulted in “a better outcome for the region and certainly for people in Gaza.”

Khanna stated that Israel only agreed to a ceasefire because American public opinion started to “turn” and that the Jewish state could have accomplished similar objectives had they struck an agreement with Hamas a few months into the war. 

According to international law, the crime of genocide requires a special intent to eliminate a population on the basis of their identity. The congressman, notably, did not identify any specific intent by Israel to exterminate the Palestinian population. 

Once a self-described ally of Israel, Khanna has emerged over the past year as one of the Democratic Party’s sharpest critics of the Jewish state — a shift observers tie to both his expected 2028 presidential bid and the party’s leftward drift on Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Khanna, widely considered to be a contender for the 2028 presidential race, has struggled to navigate the shifting landscape regarding the Israeli-Palestinian debate within the Democratic Party, whose members face competing pressure from pro-Israel constituents and progressive activists demanding a change in US policy supporting its closest Middle Eastern ally.

Last month, Khanna was pressed to support the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel in an interview with pro-Hamas outlet Drop Site News.