The admission of Gaza genocide by UN experts and international legal scholars should be a turning point in holding Israel accountable The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said on Friday.
“As scholars and practitioners of international law conflict studies and genocide studies we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” read a public statement signed by 880 scholars on October 15 one week after the Israeli aggression on Gaza began with less than 20% of the current tally of deaths and destruction.
The public statement highlighted the overwhelming evidence that Israel had carried out genocide against civilians in the Gaza Strip including disproportionate attacks and indiscriminate bombing the destruction of residential neighborhoods the use of starvation as a weapon and the complete cutoff of humanitarian supplies.
The ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza which began in 2006 according to Euro-Med Monitor is a slow-moving precursor to the crime of genocide bolstered in recent years by calls for the commission of horrific crimes that are illegal under international law.
Israel’s war since October 7 2023 in which over 11000 people have been killed or gone missing under the rubble until now is unprecedented in terms of the indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery attacks by Israeli forces the human rights group added.
Euro-Med Monitor warned that Israel wiped out Palestinian families and destroyed and leveled entire residential neighborhoods in a clear and brutal destructive attack along with forcibly displacing of 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza City and the northern areas without providing them with safe shelter but targeting hundreds of them on their displacement trip.
Israel denied more than 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip their basic supplies including food water electricity medicine and fuel directly causing a severe humanitarian crisis and deliberately exposing the population to starvation which constitutes a crime against humanity and amounts to the crime of ethnic cleansing under the law of war Euro-Med Monitor said.
