Genocide Watch
Hamas actions are war crimes, could constitute genocide – international law experts
Times of Israel
15 October 2023
Over 100 authorities from Israel and abroad say terror group’s massive attack was intended to destroy part of a national group, hostage-taking involved multiple crimes
By STUART WINER
Header Image :Israeli soldiers remove bodies of Israeli civilians in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, October 10, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Over 100 experts on international law issued a statement Sunday assessing that the Hamas terror group committed multiple war crimes in its massive assault on Israel last week and that its actions in slaughtering 1,300 people likely amounted to genocide
“These acts constitute gross violation of international law, and, in particular, of international criminal law,” declared the document, signed by academic figures and legal authorities in Israel and abroad.
“Videos, released mostly by Hamas, posted on social media, document acts of torture, sexual violence, violence towards children and molestation of bodies,” the document specified.
“As these widespread, horrendous acts appear to have been carried out with an ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part’ a national group – Israelis – a goal explicitly declared by Hamas, they most probably constitute an international crime of genocide, proscribed by the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” it added.
Among those who signed the document was Prof. Irwin Cotler, the former justice minister and attorney general of Canada. [comment: Prof. Cotler is on the Board of Advisors of Genocide Watch.]
Dan Eldad, who served as Israel’s acting state attorney from February to May 2020 and who helped put the letter together, told The Times of Israel that it may have key diplomatic value should Israel seek to persuade other countries or international organizations that remain on the fence to come down on its side, and in confronting those who express support for the Palestinian position.
“They can go to them and say, ‘Look, it was genocide,’” he said.
On October 7, over 1,500 Hamas terrorists stormed Israel’s border around the Gaza Strip and murderously rampaged through southern areas, taking over communities and killing the men, women and children they found, as well as overrunning military sites with similar deadly results. The toll from the bloody assault, which came alongside a widespread barrage of 5,000 rockets fired indiscriminately at towns and cities across Israel, has swelled to more than 1,300, the vast majority of them civilians. Thousands more were injured, hundreds of them seriously.
Among the dead were dozens of babies. Some of the victims, including entire families who were butchered, were reportedly beheaded. At an outdoor music festival, surrounded by the attackers, 260 people were systematically mowed down. In addition, the terrorists abducted around 150 people of all ages, including children and elderly women, dragging them to Gaza as captives. Hamas has continued to indiscriminately rain rockets on civilian areas of southern and central issues since the attack started.
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