Geneva – In a statement before the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for an end to procrastination and evasion, urging the international community to acknowledge that what the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have endured for nearly two years constitutes genocide perpetrated by Israel.
Euro-Med Monitor, in a joint statement with the International Institute for Law and Development during the Council's 60th session, highlighted that Israel focuses on erasing the truth and hiding evidence by targeting civil society organizations that document violations, dismantling accountability mechanisms at multiple levels, and systematically killing journalists and UN staff.
Euro-Med Monitor stressed that Israel's unprecedented crimes in Gaza would not have occurred without the international community's normalization of genocidal practices.
Lima Bustami, Head of Euro-Med Monitor's Legal Unit, said in her address to the Human Rights Council: "I speak of the genocide you refuse to name. If this is not genocide, then what is it? Or must international law be rewritten, only to absolve Israel yet again?"
"In this genocide, Israel erases truth and evidence, dismantles accountability structures, blocks, smears, and defunds civil society, and kills journalists and UN staff. But nothing said here will matter. No words can match the horrors in Gaza you witnessed, yet chose to ignore," she added.
Addressing the member states of the Council, she continued: "And you have known. You knew your arms fell on the defenseless in the name of self-defense. You knew your trade, diplomacy, and silence—invoked as security and civilization, wrapped in historic guilt for the past but blind to the present—turned your territories into channels for crime, not barriers against it, as international law demands."
Bustami further noted: "A few may sit here sincerely debating human rights. But to all others I ask: was normalizing genocide really worth it?"
In closing, the Euro-Med Monitor thanked those with conscience in their countries for their moral courage, urging them to continue pressuring their governments to ban arms sales to Israel, boycott and divest from it, support accountability efforts, and vote for justice whenever possible.
