The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor issued a powerful appeal at the United Nations Human Rights Council, demanding that the international community abandon its silence and finally recognize the ongoing massacre in Gaza as genocide committed by the Israeli occupation.

Speaking during the Council’s 60th session in Geneva, Euro-Med Monitor, in a joint statement with the International Institute for Rights and Development, condemned the world’s procrastination and evasive language, stressing that for nearly two years the Palestinian people of Gaza have endured systematic annihilation.

The Monitor underlined that Israel has sought not only to destroy Gaza’s people but also to erase the truth itself. Civil society organizations documenting war crimes have been smeared, defunded, and dismantled. Journalists and UN employees have been deliberately targeted, while accountability mechanisms have been systematically destroyed.

Euro-Med’s Legal Unit head, Lima Bustami, delivered a searing address to member states: “I am speaking about the genocide you refuse to call by its name. If this is not genocide, then what is it? Or should international law be rewritten once again to absolve Israel?”

Bustami accused states of complicity through silence, arms sales, and normalization with the occupier: “You knew your weapons fell on unarmed civilians in the name of self-defense. You knew your trade, diplomacy, and silence—justified under the guise of security and civilization—were blind to the present genocide. Your lands have turned into passageways for crime, instead of barriers against it, as international law requires.”

The statement warned that Israel’s unprecedented crimes would not have been possible without global indifference and normalization of its “genocidal practices.”

Addressing Council members directly, Bustami asked: “Was what you did truly worth normalizing genocide?”

Despite her despair at the Council’s inaction, Bustami emphasized the role of people of conscience across the globe, thanking them for their moral courage. The Euro-Med Monitor urged continued pressure for an arms embargo on Israel, boycott and divestment campaigns, accountability efforts, and votes for justice in every possible forum.

The call came as Gaza’s suffering reaches catastrophic levels, with entire neighborhoods wiped out, families exterminated, and starvation weaponized against a besieged civilian population. Yet the Monitor stressed that truth cannot be erased, and history will record both the crimes of the occupier and the silence of those who enabled it. (ILKHA)