(WASHINGTON, D.C. – 7/9/2024) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) – the nation’s umbrella group of national, regional, and local Muslim associations – today responded to a new study in the respected British medical journal, The Lancet, that sets a “conservative estimate” of Israeli-inflicted deaths in Gaza at 186,000 by calling on President Biden to implement an immediate arms embargo on the clear Israeli government as required by U.S. and international law.
The July 5th letter’s findings by public health researchers from the U.S., U.K., and Canada received support today from the testimonies of Israeli soldiers in the independent +972 Magazine documenting “the Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza,” where “Israeli soldiers describe the near-total absence of firing regulations in the Gaza war, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, and leaving corpses on the streets — all with their commanders’ permission.”
In a statement, USCMO Secretary General Oussama Jammal today said:
“In the wake of The Lancet’s study, the Biden administration can no longer turn a blind eye to what everyone who has known for eight months: we are all witnesses to the Israeli government’s live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, which has likely killed many more people than the 38,000-plus deaths reported by Gaza health authorities.
“That means the Israeli government has conservatively killed off nearly 8% of Gaza’s pre-war population – with a death toll public health specialists are telling us may range to over half a million, a staggering quarter of all Palestinians in Gaza.
“This begs a startling moral question that must be answered:
“Why in the world are we not acknowledging this utterly unequivocal, ongoing genocide committed by Israeli leadership that has from day one explicitly told us, on record, that they intended to perpetrate a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by every possible illegal means, that specified to us how they planned to carry it out, that daily updates us openly on their progress of executing that genocide, and that repeatedly set out for us in the clearest possible language their step-by-step strategies and goals in accomplishing it?
“In the face of an accumulating mountain of irrefutable evidence of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, the Biden administration must immediately cease all military and logistical support for the Israeli government and help the international community bring about just consequences for all its perpetrators and due reparations for its victims.”
USCMO and American Muslims condemn in the strongest terms this Israeli genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, as well as U.S. support for and participation in it, without which it could not have been possible. We condemn the now daily egregious Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank against defenseless, innocent Palestinians and call for an immediate ceasefire and international tribunals to bring about justice.
We call upon the president to comply with U.S. and international law by implementing a complete weapons and military aid embargo on the Israelis as perpetrators of genocide. We ask God to bring about His peace upon the Palestinians of Gaza and His Holy Land, and we beseech His divine justice.
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