Gaza: The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that the sharp escalation in Israel's targeting of civilians in the Gaza Strip is deeply alarming.
According to Qatar News Agency, the Euro-Med Monitor reported that entire families, including women and children, are being killed at horrific rates, as the international community fails to stop the nearly 19-month-long genocide. The Monitor highlighted that between April 20 and 26, Israeli occupation forces killed 345 Palestinians and injured 770 others, with at least 94% of the victims being civilians, based on field data.
The Euro-Med Monitor emphasized that Israel's deliberate targeting of simple shelters, including makeshift tents and half-destroyed homes, with heavy bombs or suicide drones, and without any justified military necessity, indicates a systematic policy aimed at causing the highest possible number of civilian casualties.
Over recent weeks, the Euro-Med Monitor's field team has documented repeated instances of entire families being wiped out, as well as the deliberate targeting of specific families in a pattern suggesting a clear intent to annihilate them. The organization stressed that civilian lives, including those of children and women, are not collateral damage to be overlooked; these are real people with personal stories, deliberately and systematically killed without Israel acknowledging any legal or moral obligations.
The Euro-Med Monitor criticized the international community's near-total silence despite the genocide being essentially livestreamed across the globe. It stated that the killing of Palestinian civilians, openly committed by Israel and its allies without fear of legal or moral consequences, has become an implicitly accepted reality within the international system.
The Monitor further asserted that international indifference to this pattern of crimes is not merely a moral failure but a grave breach of the legal obligations of states and the international community. It emphasized that this transforms the mass killing of Palestinians from criminal acts into policies carried out openly before the entire world. Silence in the face of these crimes constitutes a clear failure to fulfill the legal duty to prevent genocide and punish its perpetrators, as mandated by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Euro-Med Monitor called on all states, individually and collectively, to fulfill their legal responsibilities by taking urgent action to stop the genocide in the Gaza Strip. It urged for the implementation of effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians, ensure Israel's compliance with international law and the decisions of the International Court of Justice, and hold Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinians.
The organization also urged the international community to impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel for its systematic and grave violations of international law. These sanctions should include an arms embargo, an end to all political, financial, and military support, freezing the assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians, imposing travel bans, and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that provide Israel with economic benefits that enable its continued crimes, the Euro-Med Monitor added.