The Egyptian regime plays an active role as a partner in the crime
The supporting countries should bring Israel before the ICC on charges of genocide
As the 74th day of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip starts, the world continues watching the bitter reality in silence. The death toll has risen to 19,000 civilians, and tens of thousands have been injured, 70% of them are children and women. The infrastructure of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, the health sector collapsed, and the devastating war has affected all civilians, most of whom became displaced, without a shelter to protect them from the rain and the cold weather, or to hide them from the occupation’s missiles. However, all these horrific figures and outcomes were not enough to move the conscience of the international society or prompt it to take action.
These crimes are taking place amid the occupation’s attempts to silence all voices trying to convey the truth to the world. The journalists are currently the main targets for the Israeli killing machine, with 96 journalists being killed with the aim of obliterating the truth and covering up the crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation. Moreover, Israeli officials are no longer ashamed or attempting to hide the fact that they are carrying out the most heinous genocide and ethnic cleansing in modern history.
On Monday morning, December 18, journalist Abdallah Elian, voice commentator for Maidan of Al-Jazeera net was killed due to the bombing of his family home in Jabalia town, north of Gaza. In less than 24 hours before his killing, journalist Haneen Al-Qashtan was killed in an Israeli bombing that targeted her family’s home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. This was preceded by the killing of Al-Jazeera photojournalist Samer Abu Daqqa on December 15. Before that, on Friday, December 15, 2023, Al-Jazeera photojournalist Samer Abu Daqqa was killed after being directly targeted by an Israeli bombing, hours after he was injured along with journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh, while covering an Israeli bombing in the vicinity of Farhana School. Abu Daqqa was targeted by an Israeli reconnaissance plane along with three civilian defencemen and a number of civilians. The Israeli occupation has also killed families of dozens of Palestinian journalists, in a clear punishment of the journalists that aimed at terrorising and silencing them. On many occasions, Palestinian journalists confirmed receiving phone calls from the Israeli occupation threatening to stop the press coverage or getting killed along with their family members as well.
The occupation gangs have turned the entire Gaza Strip into an extremely dangerous area for civilians, with no safe place to seek protection from the occupation’s killing machine. While the occupation claims providing a safe passage for the displaced with security and aid in the South of the Strip, about 45% of the victims of Israeli crimes fell in places of displacement in the south, which confirms that the occupation is wiping out all the areas of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza Strip is likely to suffer a large wave of epidemics, threatening to infect at least about 600,000 people, due to the lack of hygiene, the hundreds of bodies that have been piling up under the rubble and in the streets, the fuel crisis, the collapse of infrastructure, in addition to the malfunction of the sewage and waste collection system, as well as the water desalination plant in Gaza, forcing civilians to drink contaminated water, groundwater and tank water.
During the four days complete coverage blackout imposed in the entire Strip by the occupation, through cutting off all communications, the occupation committed large numbers of atrocities, some of which became public, including the heinous crime in Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, where the occupation soldiers imposed a siege on the hospital for several days, during which they targeted it with air and artillery bombardment. They also stormed the hospital, killing and wounding patients, doctors, and hospital workers before the Israeli bulldozers buried the displaced, sick, and wounded alive in its yard.
Testimonies of eyewitnesses from the hospital confirmed that the occupation forces took doctors, nurses, and medical workers outside the hospital after stripping them of their clothes, as happened with others before, and their fate remains unknown until now. These testimonies were later confirmed by photos published by the occupation army, which included detainees who had been identified as medical staff in the hospital.
On Sunday’s night, the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis city, south of the Gaza Strip, was hit with Israeli artillery shelling which resulted in the killing and injury of civilians. The severity of the destruction due to the bombing was revealed in a picture shared by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, where the facilities in the hospital were damaged, including a wall of one of the hospital rooms, and the contents of some rooms, including beds and medical equipment.
All hospitals, medical complexes, and health care centres in the Gaza Strip were targeted, bombed, and destroyed, as part of the occupation’s policy to destroy all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip, especially the health sector. Since the beginning of the genocidal war, more than 300 health sector workers, 135 employees in The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and 35 civil defence crews have been killed.
The Israeli massacres against the Palestinian civilians continue, with a new massacre committed on Sunday in Jabalia Al-Nazla town, as the Israeli occupation bombed a house for the Khalla family who were inside, killing at least 35 people. This was preceded by a new massacre in the northern Gaza Strip, during which 60 people were killed in raids on civilian neighbourhoods. Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis is still receiving the bodies of 19 civilians so far, who were killed in air strikes, while operations to recover bodies and search under the rubble with primitive equipment continue.
Despite all the heinous and unimaginable atrocities, and with the Egyptian regime’s submission to the occupation’s will to close the Rafah crossing and prevent the entry of aid or the exit of the injured to receive treatment; Arab and Islamic countries are uniting their efforts to solve the crisis of the Israeli commercial shipments and working to resume its flow via a new land bridge, extending from the Emirates to Tel Aviv, passing through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Haifa port, which was the occupation’s last resort after the Houthis threatened to target any ships heading to Israel.
The genocide and the massacres committed by the occupation with American weapons and with international and Arab complicity are a disgrace to humanity. The Israeli occupation has crossed all red lines, and it became impossible to remain silent over its atrocities. It simply proves that international laws are empty words, that do not achieve peace, nor prevent blood shedding.
The world turned a blind eye to the Israeli occupation’s targeting civilians indiscriminately until the killing of three Israeli hostages occurred on Friday evening, December 15, whom the occupation claimed to have killed by mistake, despite them raising white flags that were supposed to prevent their killing in accordance with the provisions of international treaties. The White House described the killing of the three hostages as a tragic mistake that plunged the entire State of Israel into mourning. On the other hand, when the world unanimously agreed on the need to stop the genocide in the Gaza Strip, the United States alone used its veto power twice to disrupt two Security Council ceasefire resolutions.
The two resolutions issued by the United Nations General Assembly under the United for Peace resolution, on December 12, 2023, and October 27, 2022, were born dead, as they were non-binding, and lacked mechanisms to ensure their implementation or obliging the Israeli occupation to implement them.
Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK) renews its calls on the United Nations General Assembly to take an urgent and binding resolution with clear mechanisms to oblige Israel to stop the genocide against civilians in Gaza, ensure the immediate delivery of aid, and form a special court to try Israeli war criminals, as the International Criminal Court in its current form and with its current Public Prosecutor, who has been biased towards the Israeli occupation more than once, is not expected to provide any developments into these investigations, thus allowing the occupation leaders to continue escaping punishment
AOHR UK also calls on the countries that supported the United Nations ceasefire resolutions, especially the Arab and Islamic countries, to file a lawsuit against the Israeli occupation on the genocide it is committing in the Gaza Strip before the International Court of Justice, given the large amount of evidence and testimonies available and evidence of the prior intent of the Israeli occupation, at all levels, to carry out crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
