Euro-Med: Israel deliberately targeting women in Gaza
An international human rights organization has released a harrowing report on Israel’s deliberate targeting of women across the Gaza Strip.
The Euro-Mediterranean Monitor said in a press statement on Sunday that the regime’s forces have killed more than 21 women per day since October 2023, equivalent to approximately one Palestinian woman every hour.
The Euro-Med Monitor said the unprecedented rate of female casualties reflects a systematic pattern of mass killings by deliberately targeting Palestinian women, especially mothers, whether in their homes, displacement tents, or temporary shelters, or while trying to save their children from the bombardment.
It emphasized that Israel is killing Palestinian women in Gaza as a tool of demographic destruction, which falls within the scope of the crime of genocide.
Euro-Med said field data reveals a systematic pattern of killing pregnant women and young mothers with their children, or while trying to care for and protect their families, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and as a behavior that directly threatens the future of the Palestinian population.
The human rights group noted that its field team has documented the killing of thousands of women, many of them of childbearing age, including thousands of mothers who were killed with their children inside their homes, in displacement tents and shelters.
It stressed that the killing of women, especially pregnant women and mothers, constitutes a core element of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, which considers “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” to be an act of genocide.
Euro-Med called for urgent international action to stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza in all its forms and hold the regime accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.
It also noted that Palestinian mothers suffer from complex psychological distress as a result of losing their children, husbands, or homes, and their feelings of complete helplessness in protecting their families or providing for their basic needs.
Abeer H., a mother of four from Gaza City, said: “We have been displaced more than 10 times and have survived many bombings. I cannot reassure my children. Every night, they sleep to the sound of bombing, and I cry for fear that I will wake up and find none of them alive. I have witnessed the tragedy of mothers and children being lost. I have become a mother without power, without food.”
Gaza official health data has confirmed that 12,400 Palestinian women have been killed during 582 days of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
