The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today condemned the latest massacres by the far-right Israeli government in Gaza and Lebanon and also condemned reports that Israeli forces are putting numbers on detained Palestinian men.
According to the surviving Al-Jazeera reporters on the ground in Gaza, “The Israeli forces are literally forcing people to leave their houses, to leave their shelters, and also separating families from one another. They’re putting numbers on men. They’re putting numbers on people and interrogating them. Israel has also been digging holes and putting people inside those holes and grouping them into 10.”
The Israeli government also murdered at least 19 people, including six women and five children, in a strike on a house in southern Lebanon. The BBC reported that the dead included a former school principal and three generations of his family.
An Israeli strike on a school for displaced people in central Gaza Strip killed at least 17 people on Thursday. Almost all of the victims were women and children.
Israel has already slaughtered almost 43,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and has destroyed most of the civilian infrastructure and forcibly displaced almost all of the civilian population, and imposed forced starvation.
In a statement, CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said:
“The daily Israeli war crimes, enabled by the complicit Biden administration, meet the dictionary definition of ‘genocide’ – ‘the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.’ The genocidal actions of the far-right Israeli government are sadly reminiscent of the worst periods in world history. It is unconscionable that our nation’s government supports and excuses these crimes against humanity.”
Yesterday, CAIR called on the Biden administration to address whether the Israeli government’s reported plan for U.S. intelligence operatives and mercenaries to take control of aid distribution in Gaza and set up mass, walled-off internment camps for Palestinians is true.
The reported use of American personal in these camps comes after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected a U.S. request to publicly repudiated the so-called “General’s Plan” in which every human being left in northern Gaza would be either starved or killed.
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CONTACT: CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, 404-285-9530, e-Mitchell@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, ihooper@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Manager Ismail Allison, 202-770-6280, iallison@cair.com