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euro-mediterranean human rights monitor
Hamas Halts Hostage Release, Citing Deadly Israeli Cease-Fire Violations
One group says that Israeli forces have killed at least 110 Palestinians since the cease-fire took effect last month. Among the victims are multiple children, including a 5-year-old girl.
Feb 10, 2025
Hamas on Monday announced the suspension of its next planned release of hostages kidnapped during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, accusing that country of violating the fragile cease-fire agreement it signed last month.
Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades—Hamas' armed wing— said in a statement that hostages will "remain in place until the occupying entity complies with past obligations and compensates retroactively."
"Over the past three weeks, the resistance leadership monitored the enemy's violations and their noncompliance with the terms of the agreement," Obeida explained. "These violations include delaying the return of displaced persons to northern Gaza, targeting them with shelling and gunfire in various areas of the Gaza Strip, and failing to allow the entry of relief materials in all forms as agreed upon. Meanwhile, the resistance has fulfilled all its obligations."
Since the cease-fire took effect on January 19, Israeli forces have bombed and shot civilians in Gaza, killing at least 110 Palestinians, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Palestinian civilians killed over the past few weeks reportedly include multiple children—one of them a 5-year-old girl—and an elderly woman.
"Israel continues to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip by denying Palestinians the basic necessities for survival and imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," the group alleged on Friday.
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor continued:
Since the cease-fire, only a handful of injured and ill Palestinians from Gaza have been permitted to travel abroad for treatment, leaving thousands at risk of death due to Israel's ongoing denial of their right to receive treatment. In addition to ensuring a severe shortage of specialized medical personnel, generators, fuel, and oxygen stations, Israel has obstructed the rehabilitation of destroyed hospitals and blocked the entry of medical supplies, medications, and equipment.
Further, in addition to blocking equipment needed for maintenance and restoration, the ongoing and illegal restrictions by Israel are preventing the entry of temporary shelters, tents, and basic supplies for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes it has destroyed...
Israel is deliberately obstructing the restoration of essential infrastructure, including water and sewage systems, endangering civilian lives and worsening environmental and health crises.
This, after over 15 months of Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and international humanitarian agencies.
U.S. President Donald Trump—whose proposal for an American takeover and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East" has sparked international condemnation—said Monday that the cease-fire should end, letting "all hell break loose," if all the remaining 40 or so Israeli and international hostages are not released by noon on Saturday.
The Qassam Brigades on Monday reaffirmed Hamas' "commitment to the terms of the agreement as long as the occupation adheres to them."
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'Where Can People Go?': Israel Kills 28 in Latest Attack on Gaza School-Turned-Shelter
"By striking these supposed shelters, Israel is intensifying the already catastrophic situation for civilians, many of whom have nowhere left to escape," a human rights group said.
Oct 10, 2024
An Israeli airstrike on a school in central Gaza killed at least 28 people on Thursday, including civilian men, women, and children.
The victims were among the million displaced Palestinians seeking shelter in the city of Deir Al-Balah in Gaza more than one year into Israel's assault on the enclave. The attack came after Israel issued new evacuation orders for northern Gaza on Monday as it escalated its bombardment and invasion of the area, in particular the Jabalia refugee camp.
"By striking these supposed shelters, Israel is intensifying the already catastrophic situation for civilians, many of whom have nowhere left to escape," Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on social media in response to the airstrike.
"This is not just another attack—it's a systematic assault aimed at wiping out entire Palestinian family lines."
Or, as Iftekhar Hammouda, a woman sheltering at the school askedCNN, "Where can people go? Where do they flee? They hit us at our homes, at our tents, on the streets, and at the schools."
The Palestine Red Crescent Society wrote on social media that it had responded to an attack on the Rafida School that killed 28 people and wounded 54.
The death toll was later verified by local hospitals, according to CNN. A rescue worker told the news agency that relatives were searching for their loved ones "in pieces."
Unverified video footage posted online included graphic images of wounded survivors as well as rescue workers handling body parts of those ripped apart by the bombing described as a "horrific massacre."
One of the survivors searching for family, Ayman Abou Khousa, told CNN, "We are dying every day," adding, "The world has sold us out."
Al Jazeera described the scene at Al-Aqsa Hospital, where the wounded were taken for treatment:
The situations continue to be very difficult inside the emergency department where medical staff are pretty much unable to provide any necessary medical intervention to save lives.
The bomb that was dropped by the F-16 packed with nails, packed with pieces of metals and shrapnel that cut through the flesh and caused severe bleeding.
Many of the victims arriving at the hospital, their blood filled up the courtyard of the hospital the moment the door of the ambulance vehicle opened.
In a statement reported by Reuters, the Israeli military said Thursday's bombardment was a "precise strike on terrorists" who had established a command center in the school. The Israel Defense Forces have long justified their attacks on civilian infrastructure by claiming Hamas uses schools and hospitals as staging grounds for attacks, a charge Hamas denies.
Hammouda told CNN that there was no Hamas presence at the school. Gaza's Government Media Office said the majority of those wounded or killed in the attack were women and children.
"The occupation army was aware that this school included thousands of displaced children and women who were displaced from their homes and whose civilian neighborhoods were bombed," the media office said in a statement reported by Al Jazeera. "It chose the time of the bombing at the peak time when these children and women were moving to get their daily food."
The office continued: "We condemn the Israeli occupation's commission of this new massacre and the ongoing massacres against civilians, children, and women, and we call on all countries of the world to condemn these ongoing crimes against the displaced, against civilians, against children and women."
Israel has bombed almost 85% of the schools in Gaza since it launched its offensive on the strip following Hamas' attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Recent attacks include two airstrikes last month on a United Nations school in central Gaza that killed at least 18 and a bombing of a school in Gaza City in August that killed at least 12.
"Since Israel began committing genocide in Gaza, it has bombed at least 190 shelters. Places meant to be safe havens have become death traps for families forcibly driven from their homes," The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) wrote on social media.
"In the past year, Israel has deliberately targeted areas where families have taken refuge, knowing they include children and the elderly," the nonprofit continued. "This is not just another attack—it's a systematic assault aimed at wiping out entire Palestinian family lines."
IMEU added that the U.S. government was currently complicit in these attacks: "The U.S. continues to supply Israel with weapons, giving it the means to carry out these war crimes which are made possible by American support. The president must act to end Israel's genocidal campaign now."
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Israeli Snipers Firing at 'Anyone Who Is Moving' in Khan Younis
The southern Gaza city is the latest region where Israeli forces have issued an evacuation order, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Jul 25, 2024
At least 129 people have been killed in the last five days of Israeli shelling and artillery fire in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where the Israel Defense Forces earlier this week gave people "a couple of minutes only" to evacuate earlier this week, according to Al Jazeera reporter Hind Khoudary, before the bombardment began.
Al Jazeera reported on Thursday that "the vast majority of dead and injured are women and children," as Israeli snipers have also been deployed in the city and are firing at Palestinians indiscriminately.
The snipers "are shooting anyone who is moving," wrote Tareq Abu Azzoum in a dispatch, reporting that the eastern part of Khan Younis is the main target of Israel's current assault.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) noted that the latest evacuation order reduced the area that Israel has claimed is a "humanitarian zone," as the order covered about 15% of al-Mawasi, where people from cities including Rafah and Gaza City have fled in recent months as the IDF has launched assaults in those cities.
The group told Al Jazeera that "there is no more space, even for a single tent, in the so-called 'humanitarian area' of al-Mawasi because of the overwhelming number of people displaced there."
Israel's reported indiscriminate assault on the city has included medical workers, said PRCS, which posted a video on social media Thursday of an ambulance that had been hit by live bullets fired by the IDF while medics were transporting an injured person.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor noted on Monday that the true death toll in Khan Younis—as with the rest of Gaza—may not be known for months, "with many victims remaining trapped under the rubble and in the streets, where rescue workers have not been able to retrieve their bodies."
The group also said the IDF had perpetrated "a kind of deception of the residents" of Khan Younis and villages in the area, including Bali Suhaila, where soldiers entered "amid very violent bombardment, even though the Israeli army had said in its orders that the displacement was going to be temporary."
The forced evacuation, false information about the order, and shrinking of the humanitarian zone were "all part of Israel's media disinformation campaign and psychological warfare tactics, since military assaults on forcibly displaced people and their tents have occurred continually in this area for several weeks now, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries," the Euro-Med Monitor.
The reports of indiscriminate shooting by snipers also bolster an account given by Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who volunteered at European Hospital in Khan Younis in April, to CBS News earlier this week.
"I had sniper bullets," said Perlmutter. "I have children that were shot twice... I have two children that I have photographs of, that were shot so perfectly in the chest... and directly on the side of the head on the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world's best sniper. And they're dead-center shots."
Perlmutter is among nearly four dozen doctors and nurses who wrote to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and First Lady Jill Biden on Thursday, describing what they saw while volunteering at hospitals across Gaza since Israel began bombarding the enclave and blocking nearly all humanitarian aid, including medications and medical supplies, nearly 10 months ago.
"Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict," wrote the medical workers. "However, every single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest."
"We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget," they added. "We cannot believe that anyone would continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children after seeing what we have seen."
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