Rep. Ro Khanna was pressed in a Drop Site News interview on Tuesday to say whether he would support Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks, and he refused. The California Democrat, fresh from a trip to the West Bank, instead called the assault a terrorist attack and said he would not defend the killing of Israelis.
The interview landed because Khanna was not speaking in the abstract. He had just returned from the West Bank, where he said Israeli settlers and Israeli military forces unjustly detained him, and he used the appearance to describe the Palestinians he met there as people who “just want to live their lives in dignity and peace.” That set up a live argument over how a progressive lawmaker should talk about armed resistance, Israel and Hamas after a war that still shapes every political conversation around Gaza.
Jeremy Scahill kept returning to the same point: if Khanna called Oct. 7 a terrorist attack, why would he not say Palestinians had any right to strike Israelis in response to occupation? Khanna answered that he did not believe Hamas had a right to attack Israeli soldiers or kill Israelis, and he said Israel had a right to go after Hamas terrorists “who killed the civilians” on Oct. 7. He added that Israel did not have that right “in the way they went about it, which I said is genocide.”
Scahill said that was an unfair double standard. He told Khanna he was baffled that the congressman could say Israel had a right to drop “a single bomb on Gaza” in response to Oct. 7 while, in his view, Palestinians were being told they had “no right whatsoever to ever kill an Israeli.” Khanna did not draw a hard line against the idea of armed resistance when Scahill narrowed the question to “armed resistance against Israeli occupation soldiers in uniform.”
Instead, Khanna shifted to a narrower definition of self-defense, saying that if Palestinians felt there was an illegal attack on them by “a violent settler or by an Israeli soldier” in a school or against a civilian, “then of course they should have justice.” He then said, “I will look at it, but I don’t think that the solution in that area is to encourage [violence],” while saying he supported peaceful resistance. For now, that leaves the clearest answer from the interview in plain view: Khanna would condemn Oct. 7, but he would not bless Hamas violence or give Scahill the endorsement he wanted.
The exchange also matters because Drop Site has become a place where those arguments are aired in full, and not always gently. The outlet launched in July 2024 with an 8,000-word interview with two senior Hamas leaders, and Khanna’s appearance showed how quickly its own framing can turn into a test of whether guests will go further than they want on Gaza, Hamas and Israel. What remains unresolved is not whether Khanna condemned the attack. It is whether he will keep trying to split the difference between saying Oct. 7 was terrorism and defending Palestinians’ right to justice without crossing into support for violence.
