Ben & Jerry’s cofounder arrested at US Senate after protesting war in Gaza | Protests News

Ben Cohen among seven people arrested after interrupting testimony by US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and six other people have been arrested after disrupting a United States Senate hearing to protest Washington’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

The arrests of Ben Cohen and the other protestors on Wednesday came as US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr was giving testimony to lawmakers on his shake-up of federal health agencies.

“Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the US,” Cohen said as he was escorted away by police.

The seven were arrested on charges of “crowding, obstructing or incommoding”, assault of a police officer or resisting arrest, US Capitol Police said in a statement.

Police said Cohen was only charged with crowding, obstructing or incommoding, a misdemeanor punishable by 90 days in jail, a $500 fine, or both.

Cohen and his Ben & Jerry’s cofounder Jerry Greenfield are well known for their progressive activism, including opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

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”.

A US judge the following year rejected Ben & Jerry’s bid for an injunction to block the sales after finding that the company had failed to show that it would suffer irreparable harm.

Ben & Jerry’s, which was founded in 1978 in the US state of Vermont, and its parent company, Unilever, later settled their legal dispute on undisclosed terms.

In March, 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 on the country.