Crimes of the Zionist occupation and its allies in Gaza
Sourour TALBI (Professor of International Law and International Relations)
Summary of an intervention presented during the international conference on the war of extermination against Gaza, held on December 2, 2023.
Crimes-of-the-Zionist-occupation-and-its-allies-in-Gaza
On the morning of October 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance ‘Hamas’ executed a double operation, involving rocket launches and ground infiltration into the occupied Palestinian Territories, in response to the unjust Zionist siege on the Gaza Strip and violations in the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and in the rest of the occupied Palestinian Territories.
This operation, which was called “Al-Aqsa Flood” or the “Third Palestinian Intifada,” lasted only a few hours, so that during this sudden and lightning attack, the Palestinian resistance gained control over military bases near Gaza and seize secret files and tanks.
This confrontation led to casualties and the capture of a number of Zionists, including settlers, conscripts, officers, a lieutenant colonel, and a brigadier general, before the resistance withdrew and returned to Gaza.
Subsequently, over fifty days, the Zionist occupation and its allies launched a violent air, land, and sea assault on civilian sites in Gaza, violating international and humanitarian laws. They committed a range of international crimes, summarized as follows:
Intense and direct raids on habited buildings, hospitals, shelters, schools, Mosques, churches, and infrastructure … resulted in the death and wounding of countless civilians, including old persons, women, children, journalists, and relief crews.
Terrorizing civilians, urging them to displace, and forcibly displacing them by causing extensive destruction and harm to children, women, and old persons.
Use of internationally banned weapons:
Phosphorous bombs, which cause injuries and wounds that often lead to damage the respiratory system and failure of some body organs.
Dangerous cluster bombs that contain high-explosive devices.
Shells whose fragments penetrate the body and explode inside it, causing poisoning or strange swelling, and terrible burns that dissolve the skin and bones of the injured and lead to the amputation of limbs.
Turning hospitals into mass graves by besieging, bombing, or putting them out of service and cutting off their supplies of fuel and medical equipment and arresting medical staff.
Cutting off water, food, electricity, fuel, and humanitarian aids to civilians, along with bombing the crossings.
Torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners, including skinning and mutilation of the bodies of resistance martyrs.
The allies of the Zionist occupation in the war of extermination against Gaza:
All systems and governments that supply them with weapons.
All regimes, governments, peoples, international institutions and media that support them politically and economically.
All regimes and governments that prevent their people from expressing their solidarity with the victims of Gaza.
All regimes and governments that abstained from voting on the ceasefire resolution.
In conclusion, it must be remembered that the people of Gaza have endured this genocide for approximately 17 years, when the Zionist occupation imposed an unjust siege on this sector and launched repeated military attacks against it, claiming the lives of countless martyrs, wounded and captive children. Women and old persons.
The Zionist occupation violates also since 1948 all international agreements, treaties and resolutions, and deprives the Palestinian people of enjoying the minimum requirements for a decent life under the eyes of the international community and its institutions, which openly apply double standards.
Our hope is not that these biased institutions will move to support those people and their resistance movement, but rather to raise awareness of world public opinion and the rest of the societies of the truth of what is happening in Palestine and even the truth of the world order, which the first thing it did after the founding of the United Nations was to legitimize the violation of the holy land of Palestine and allowed killing its indigenous inhabitants.
Therefore, resistance is a right and falls within the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, independence and sovereignty over their land and the exercise of all their inalienable rights, as well as the right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they were deported.
The Islamic resistance in Gaza gives the world a practical lesson in freedom and humanity, and it struggles on behalf of all of us to break the shackles of the corrupt global system that plunders people’s money to finance its biased institutions.