Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon has joined five US politicians this week on a hunger strike to demand President Joe Biden call for a permanent Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
The 57-year-old actress and activist, who formerly ran for mayor of New York City, told a crowd outside the White House her two of her three children are Jewish and their grandparents are Holocaust survivors.
She said: "I have been asked by my son to use any voice I have to affirm as loudly as possible that never again means never again for everyone.
"In seven weeks, Israel has killed more civilians on a tiny strip of land than was killed in 20 years of war in the entire country of Afghanistan."
Nixon added that she's "sick and tired" of people dismissing civilian casualties as "a routine toll of war" and pleads the Democrat to use his power to put an end to the brutality for good.
"I would like to make a personal plea to a president who has, himself, experienced such devastating personal loss, to connect with that empathy for which he is so well known and to look at the children of Gaza and imagine that they were his children."
Cynthia joined politicians from five US states outside the White House in Washington D.C. to protest with a hunger strike to mark what would have been the end of a four-day truce, which will now continue for two more days. The five representatives taking part in the action are Delaware's Madinah Wilson-Anton, New York's Zohan Mamdani, Mauree Turner for Oklahoma, Virginia's Sam Rasoul and Abraham Aiyash for Michigan.
The actress will take part in the protest for two days before she returns to New York for work commitments. "We are here hunger-striking just to sort of mirror to Biden the kind of deprivation that is happening in Gaza and how he has it within his power to make a cease-fire happen," Nixon told reporters on Monday, per the Times of Israel.
One of the placards she held up read: "Biden, you are starving Gaza. Permanent ceasefire now!"