Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first testimony before Congress was interrupted by Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen, who was subsequently arrested alongside other protestors. 

Kennedy, President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS), made an appearance before a House panel and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee on Wednesday to present HHS’s 2026 budget. 

Early into the hearing, about a half dozen protesters stood up and chanted, “RFK kills people with AIDS” — an interruption that initially left Kennedy visibly startled. 

After the protestors were swiftly removed by Capitol police, Cohen stood up and shouted, “Congress sent the bombs that kill children in Gaza and pays it with cuts to Medicaid” before he was also removed from the hearing.

Following his arrest, Cohen — handcuffed — reiterated his earlier statement in the hallway, adding, “What has it been? 75 days?” when asked how many days children have been starving in Gaza. 

“Congress and the Senators need to ease the siege,” Cohen said. “They need to let food into Gaza. They need to let food to starving kids.”

After the protestors were removed, Kennedy resumed his opening remarks without commenting on the interruption.

Cohen, who co-founded the ice cream brand in 1978, has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli government’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. 

Today's protest follows a recent appearance Cohen made alongside Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, along with veterans, doctors, and faith leaders “to call for an immediate end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and demand an end of the food, water and aid blockade,” he wrote on X.  

“Israel is literally starving them to death,” he said at the press conference. “We will not look away. We will not be silenced. We will do everything we can to get our government to stop being complicit in starving little kids to death.”

Cohen’s protest comes on the heels of an Israeli attack on Gaza that killed at least 84 people on Wednesday. 

“Gaza’s Ministry of Health said almost 50 people were killed around Jabalia and 10 others in the southern city of Khan Younis,” Al Jazeera reported. “In Jabalia, rescue workers smashed through collapsed concrete slabs using hand tools, lit only by the light of cellphone cameras, to remove the bodies of some of the children who were killed.”

“This has been a very dramatic reality and it underscores the severity of the humanitarian toll that children and displaced families in northern Gaza have been bearing over the course of the past week,” Tareq Abu Azzoum reported for the outlet.

Apart from his vocal opposition to the killings in Gaza, Cohen has also broadly endorsed antiwar efforts.

In an April 11 X post, the entrepreneur shared a video in which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth commented on the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) cutting of $5.1 billion in wasteful spending. 

“Funny, in the same time, we found $145.2 billion...not million...that's with a B,” Cohen wrote. He provided a detailed outline for cutting spending from the Defense Department, including cutting down over 800 worldwide military bases, which, he wrote, “costs $100 billion (or more) per year.”