Today marks the second Friday of protests along Gaza’s border with Israel. Nearly 35,000 Gazans launched a 6-week protest campaign, the #GreatMarchOfReturn, on March 30, 2018. On that day Israel deployed more than 100 snipers, who killed at least 18 Gazans and wounded another 758.
Gaza’s fearless independent journalists are covering the march, providing evidence that Israel is committing genocide as well as war crimes in Gaza. Fifty years ago, the world said, “never again” and tried to prevent future genocidal acts.
In 1948 United Nation Member States defined the crime of genocide in Article II of the U.N. Genocide Convention Treaty:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Israeli snipers and their leaders should also peruse Article IV:
Persons committing genocide…shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
149 countries have ratified or acceded to the treaty, including the United States and Israel.
Gazans will continue to protest until May 15, the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding and Palestinians’ Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted in 1948. |
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