Euro-Med, the Geneva-based independent Human Rights Monitor, issued a press release on Monday condemning the Israeli regime for turning the Gaza Strip into a ‘genocidal ghetto’, imposing a tragic reality on the Strip, whose severity and intensity surpasses that of the infamous Srebrenica enclave.
Euro-Med said in statement: ‘Israel is legitimising and enforcing a systematic pattern of geographic siege on Gaza, extended beyond a comprehensive blockade to include forcible internal confinement. This traps Palestinians within a small, devastated area under conditions more severe and crowded than those in the Srebrenica enclave before its fall in 1995, when genocide occurred.’
This is not the first time that comparisons with the massacre of civilians in Srebrenica has been drawn by human rights advocates.
In January 2024, just months after the Zionist regime launched its genocidal attacks on the Strip, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, posted on X that:
‘It is not that different from other massacres of civilians if you look closer. Genocide is a process, not a single act. It must be prevented, but in Gaza – as in Srebrenica and Rwanda before – the world is just letting it happen.’
The Srebrenica genocide occurred in July 1995 when over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War, while the Rwanda massacre took place in 1994 when nearly one million people were killed.
Two and a half years on, since Albanese issued her dire warning, the Israeli regime has carried on with its genocidal war of ethnic cleansing under the protection of the US and its imperialist allies.
This has created a crisis far exceeding the barbaric slaughter of previous war crimes.
Euro-Med points out that ‘On the eve of Srebrenica’s fall in 1996, nearly 40,000 people were besieged within roughly 150 square kilometres. Meanwhile, for most of Gaza’s approximately 2.1 million residents, the remaining habitable areas has shrunk to just about 128 square kilometres.’
Euro-Med carries on: ‘The residents of the Gaza Strip face a reality that deliberately subjects them to conditions intended to undermine the Palestinian population, either partially or entirely. This includes measures such as deportation or forced transfer, with efforts to legitimise and promote this displacement internationally under misleading terms like ‘freedom of movement’ or ‘voluntary emigration’.
Over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have been deliberately deprived of essential resources, prevented from returning to their land and homes, while Israeli Occupation Forces have made large parts of Gaza prohibited zones in what ‘effectively amount to an unlawful annexation and seizure of land.’
The attempts to forcibly transfer the population ‘are a direct continuation of Israel’s settler-colonial approach, which has persisted for decades, and is based on policies aimed at erasing Palestinian history, space and demographics, along with the systematic seizure of land.’
Euro-Med called for the international community and all countries to unequivocally oppose any plans to depopulate Gaza, or force residents to leave it under cover of flagrantly misleading terms like ‘voluntary emigration’ or ‘freedom of movement’.
It ended with a call for countries to implement prompt and effective punitive actions against Israel instead of merely issuing condemnation statements.
Over 75,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, have been killed in Gaza, including over 1,000 killed since the US imposed October ‘ceasefire’, in nearly three years of Zionist genocide.
In all that time the Israeli state has acted with impunity under the protection of the US and its imperialist allies, which have not just sat back and watched genocide taking place but are actively complicit in arming and supporting the Zionist regime.
The working class in the US, UK and across Europe have shown their support for the Palestinians and the time has come for this support to be acted on.
Workers must demand their trade unions take action by calling general strikes to bring down their governments, replacing them with workers governments, that will end all complicity with the Zionist regime and give all the support required for the establishment of the independent state of Palestine.
