A Palestinian man carries a child casualty following Israeli strikes on houses in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by Reuters)
Rafah, March 30 (RHC)-- The Israeli military has executed 13 Gazan children in and near Al-Shifa Hospital in the war-torn Gaza Strip in a single week, a report says. In a shocking report, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor revealed that 13 children were killed through direct shooting by Israeli soldiers in blatant violation of international law in Al-Shifa Medical Complex and its Gaza City environs earlier this month.
“For over a week now, the Israeli army has been conducting systematic and horrifying military operations inside and around Al-Shifa Medical Complex. These crimes include extrajudicial executions and deliberate killings of Palestinian civilians,” it said.
The Geneva-based organization added that its field team had received identical testimonies about the killings and executions of Palestinian children, who were between the ages of four and 16, at the time of their demise. “Some of the fatal shootings occurred during an Israeli army siege while the victims’ families were inside their homes; others occurred when the victims attempted to escape via routes that the Israeli army had designated as ‘safe’ after forcibly evacuating them from their homes and places of residence,” the report said.
The rights monitor called on the United Nations Special Rapporteur to take urgent action to probe and document the killings committed by Israeli forces in and near Al-Shifa Medical Complex, urging the official to push for effective measures to hold the perpetrators and those who gave the orders accountable.
Since the onset of the current Israeli war on Gaza on October 7, the regime has killed over 32,500 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 74,980 others. Israel has also imposed a “complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the Israeli military has so far killed more than 14,400 children in the Gaza Strip, meaning children make up more than one-third of the dead victims of Israel’s crimes in the coastal sliver.
“The killing of these children by the Israeli army in such a systematic and widespread manner is clearly intentional. This serves as further evidence of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, as well as its deliberate destruction of entire generations of Palestinians living there,” the rights organization warned.
The rights organization also called on the international community must act swiftly and forcefully to defend Palestinian civilians from Israel’s nearly six-month-long genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Despite a massive death toll, the Israeli military has failed to achieve the goals it has been seeking to score through the campaign in Gaza, such as “destroying” Hamas, finding the captives that the Gaza-based resistance movement is holding, and bringing about forced displacement of the Palestinian territory’s population to Egypt.
