Photo released by the Israeli military on June 23, 2024 shows an occupation tank operating in Rafah, in the southern the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing war on the Palestinian territory. (Via AFP)
Geneva, July 2 (RHC)-- A Geneva-based rights group has documented a new Israeli war crime in the Gaza Strip, where an occupation tank deliberately ran over an injured Palestinian mother in front of her son.
In a statement released on Sunday, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) said an Israeli tank ran over 65-year-old Safiya Hassan Musa al-Jamal after she was injured in a raid by the regime forces on her house in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood on Thursday. Safiya’s son, Muhannad al-Jamal, also witnessed the killing, it added.
Muhannad, 28, told Euro-Med that he, along with his mother, three sisters and niece, hid in the house after Israeli troops attacked Shuja’iyya on Thursday morning. “After sunset, we heard gunfire … and realized that the soldiers had stormed the house,” he said.
“When they found us in the room, they started firing at the walls randomly and threw five bombs amid gunfire… I was hit by shrapnel in my back, along with my sisters. My mother was struck by a large piece of shrapnel in her chest.”
They were detained for over three hours despite their injuries in their home, near Israeli tanks in a dangerous combat zone, where they were used as human shields, it added. Muhannad also said that he and his unconscious mother were taken by Israeli tanks to the Mustaha roundabout.
“I had assumed that we would be taken to a medical facility ..., but instead they (Israeli forces) tackled me and my mother, putting her on the ground,” he continued. “After the soldiers entered the tank, it started to move backward and ran over my mother. When I saw the scene, I thought I had gone insane and began to cry and scream.... I fled, fearing for my life.”
Euro-Med had previously documented many instances of Israeli tanks intentionally running over live civilians in the besieged Gaza. “Crushing civilians with tanks is just one of the many brutal ways the Israeli army murders Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” the rights group said in its statement.
Such practices, it stressed, reflect Israel’s intention to “collectively punish the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating, intimidating, and/or harming them physically and psychologically.”
Euro-Med further urged the international community to take immediate action to put an end to Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
Israel unleashed its brutal Gaza onslaught on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 37,877 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 86,969 others in the Gaza Strip.
