The Legal Department of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine stated that the entrenchment of a culture of impunity in how the international community and its organizations deal with Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip is what encourages Israeli soldiers to confess to committing horrific atrocities — whether through field executions, home demolitions, or other acts — that rise to the level of war crimes. Accordingly, the silence of the international community and its judicial institutions, and their failure to follow up on what the soldiers have perpetrated, constitutes complicity that perpetuates all the crimes being committed in front of the cameras.
The Legal Department added: Over the past two days, two incidents have emerged that require the attention of international judicial bodies and legal and humanitarian organizations:
The first concerns media reports of admissions by Israeli soldiers and officers stating that they deliberately opened fire on civilians receiving humanitarian aid in Gaza, even though those individuals posed no threat to them. They further revealed that the U.S.-Israeli organization called “Humanitarian Gaza” had forced residents to be present at those locations to obtain food — which had become death traps and ambushes — leading to the deaths of over 550 civilians receiving aid.
The second issue involves the discovery of narcotic pills inside flour bags distributed at aid centres supervised by the United States and Israel. There is suspicion that some of these pills may have been intentionally ground and mixed into the flour, potentially creating a humanitarian disaster and representing another crime no less severe than acts of genocide and the field execution of Palestinian civilians.
The Legal Department of the Democratic Front asserts that these two incidents, in addition to dozens of others — each of which constitutes a prosecutable crime — amount to well-defined war crimes. These acts clearly violate Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which defines genocide as killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting living conditions intended to destroy the group in whole or in part. They also violate Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which does not differ in its definition of genocide from that of the Rome Statute.
The Legal Department stated that the Israeli occupation will not hesitate to commit the vilest and most heinous crimes, including spreading addiction to destroy the social fabric of Gaza’s population and undermine their unity and solidarity — a crime that is no less dangerous than genocide and in fact represents an extension of it. This requires civil society institutions and all grassroots bodies, particularly those operating in areas of displacement and shelter, to develop awareness programs that include warning campaigns about the dangers of tolerating any suspicious phenomena.
The Legal Department of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine calls on the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice to include the confessions of Israeli soldiers and the case of the narcotic pills in their files on Israel’s war crimes and acts of genocide. It also urges the United Nations and all concerned international institutions to provide specialized laboratories in the Gaza Strip to test everything sent by institutions supervised by Israel — a state that will stop at nothing to kill the Palestinian people by every possible means, whether through airstrikes, field executions, or tampering with food and medical aid, all of which have become tools of killing in horrifying scenes unprecedented in human history.