US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis

US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) lambasted Israeli officials as “genocidal” for targeting a senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, despite remaining silent just days earlier when Hezbollah killed 12 children in a rocket attack on northern Israel.

“This is exactly what the genocidal maniac [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the majority of Israeli officials want,” Tlaib wrote on social media. “They want a full-blown regional war, and guess what? It will be American dollars funding this expansion of genocidal war. We must stop this madness now. More innocent lives will be killed.”

Tlaib was referring to Israel killing Fuad Shukr, the senior Hezbollah commander, with an air strike in Beirut, Lebanon on Tuesday. At the time of his death, Shukr was wanted by the US government for his connection to the 1983 suicide bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. The terrorist attack took the lives of 241 US military personnel.

The Israeli strike came in response to a Hezbollah rocket attack over the weekend on a soccer field in Majdal Shams, a small Druze town in the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria. The attack from southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah exerts major political and military influence, killed 12 children. The Jewish state vowed that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization, would pay a “severe” and “heavy price” for the strike.

Majdal Shams is located at the foot of Mount Hermon, directly in the line of fire from the rocket launch site in Shebaa in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah denied responsibility for the strike when it emerged that the victims of the attack were Arab Druze children, although the rocket that hit Majdal Shams was the same one the terrorist group claimed responsibility for firing at the Hermon region at 7:30 pm local time. Both the US and Israel have also said that Hezbollah was responsible for the strike.

Tlaib notably did not release any statements condemning the initial Hezbollah strike on Majdal Shams. The congresswoman also did not express any public sympathies for the children who died as a result of Hezbollah’s attack. 

In the months following Hamas’ brutal slaughter of roughly 1,200 people throughout southern Israel on Oct. 7, Tlaib has levied a series of withering criticisms toward the Jewish state. Tlaib, the only Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has repeatedly accused Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza. During a recent video call with anti-Israel political activist Linda Sarsour, the US lawmaker also called America “the number one investor of genocide” in the world. Tlaib has also baselessly accused Israel of inflicting “famine” on civilians in Gaza. In May, she was a featured speaker at a terrorist-connected, anti-Israel conference.