One week into the Jewish Part: IIIV state offensive against Gaza, 800 distinguished legal scholars and practitioners raised the alarm about an impending genocide in the region. What made this warning particularly impactful and unsettling was the collective consensus reached by numerous legal experts. Such a grave assertion is not made lightly. Since the release of that letter, the situation in Gaza has deteriorated further. The death toll has surpassed 11,000, with around 2,650 individuals, including approximately 1,400 children, reported missing, potentially trapped, or deceased under the rubble. Struggling medical facilities are overwhelmed by tens of thousands of wounded, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis marked by severe shortages of food, water, fuel, and electricity. To comprehend the unfolding events in Gaza, it is crucial to examine the key legal frameworks that define genocide: Article 6 of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and Article 2 of the Genocide Convention. According to these documents, genocide involves acts carried out with the explicit intent to annihilate, either wholly or partially, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Such acts encompass killing members of the group, causing them serious harm, and imposing conditions of life aimed at the physical destruction of the group, either in whole or in part, among other underlying actions. Notably, the targeted population can be a geographically limited segment of the group. Gaza’s devastating reality mirrors these components of genocide. Despite claiming to target only Hamas, the Jewish state is engaged in an all-out assault on the whole population of Gaza. In just the first week of its relentless assault, it dropped more than 6,000 bombs on the Strip – nearly as many as the United States used in Afghanistan in an entire year. Using high-impact munitions in one of the most densely populated places in the world inevitably leads to a high death toll among civilians, as we have witnessed already in Gaza. In a month, the Zionist regime bombardment has martyred more than 4,400 children and 2,900 women, with many of the men in these horrific statistics also non-combatants. It has also mass-targeted Yesterday, the Jewish state announced that it had conducted five thousand military operations with aircraft and heavy weaponry over Gaza. However, the leaders of the 57 Islamic countries gathered at the emergency summit in Riyadh could not reach any agreement on joint and practical action against the Zionist regime to stop the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. These 57 leaders are the heads of state and government of countries with a combined Muslim population of 1.9 billion, and these 57 countries are members of the “Organization of Islamic Cooperation,” the largest and most influential political organization in the Islamic world. However, they were unable to take unified action against the Zionist regime’s bombardment or killing of innocent people in Gaza. Three weeks ago (October 21, 2023), Arab leaders in the “Arab League,” who had a similar summit in Cairo, also failed to reach a unified and practical decision regarding Zionist’s cessation of the Gaza massacre. Interestingly, amusingly, and still sadly, in that summit, Lebanon and Algeria proposed preventing the export and import of oil to the Jewish state. OIC: Most ineffective organization in resolving conflicts of muslim world civilian buildings, including hospitals and schools, sheltering the displaced. It has bombed residential buildings, wiping out whole families from the population registrar; more than 45 percent of homes were destroyed or damaged, many of them in the supposed “safe areas” of the south where the Zionist regime army had instructed Palestinians to evacuate. The widespread killing of civilians is coupled with the imposition of living conditions explicitly intended for the physical destruction of the Palestinian people. The occupier state has enforced a complete blockade on Gaza, described by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of the Zionist regime as “no electricity, no food, no water and no gas.” Jewish state airstrikes on hospitals, the deliberate targeting of their solar panels, and the obstruction of fuel deliveries suggest an intention to hinder Palestinians from accessing critical healthcare. With over one-third of hospitals and two-thirds of primary healthcare facilities in Gaza already closed, it is evident that the occupier’s denial of sufficient humanitarian aid, including essential items like food and water, signifies a willingness to let the Palestinian population succumb to starvation and disease. The Zionist regime and military officials have also verbalized their genocidal intent towards the Palestinian people. On October 9, when announcing the total blockade, Gallant described the 2.3 million people in Gaza as “human animals.” On November 5, Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu said one of Israel’s options in Gaza is to drop a nuclear bomb. He also explained that no humanitarian aid should be provided to Palestinian civilians as “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.” While his statement faced criticism from the Zionist regime officials, the concerns raised were primarily centered around the potential impact on the “Zionist regime image” rather than acknowledging the grave implications of such remarks as a potential tool of genocide. With all the explicit statements and ruthless attacks, as well as the mass killing of the innocent people of Gaza, the world has plunged into a deadly silence. The silence of countries and the global community reflects the deceptive face of human rights that the United States and the West have consistently used as a tool against Muslims and the Muslim world. Therefore, we must understand that the people of Gaza are the most oppressed, innocent, and victimized nation on Earth, and the world watches their killings. The world only provides statistics of Palestinian victims for others, and Islamic countries send shrouds for them. It is a stain on the history of human rights advocates. Mashal Noori
Genocide in Gaza: A call to urgent global action
