Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said during a Munich security conference panel on Friday on the future of foreign policy that the Democratic party’s next presidential nominee should reconsider the country’s military aid to Israel.

Hagar Shezaf of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked the US congresswoman if she thought “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel”.

“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.

“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.

“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.

The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.

But, according to Charles Blaha, the former director of the state department office that leads Leahy vetting of foreign security units, while state “department officials insist that Israeli units are subject to the same vetting standards as units from any other country. Maybe in theory. But in practice, that’s simply not true.”

Matt Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, declined to directly answer the question, saying Israel is “one of our closest allies”.

Earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez had accused Donald Trump of seeking to introduce an “age of authoritarianism” and condemning his foreign policy in front of its allies’ top policymakers.

In her remarks, Ocasio-Cortez said Trump and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, were “looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianism”, as they sought to “carve out a world where Donald Trump can command the western hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to bully our own allies there”.

She went on further to outline what she called an “alternative vision” for a leftwing US foreign policy, saying that she and her fellow Democrats were calling for a return to a “rules-based order” without the “hypocrisies” of US foreign policy that have dominated the past and current administrations.

It remains unclear how big a role Democrats’ positions on the Israel-Gaza conflict will play in the 2028 presidential race. Some of the Democrats viewed as likely contenders have already faced questions on the issue, with some staking out a more critical stance than Kamala Harris or Joe Biden did in the 2024 race.

Andrew Roth contributed reporting