22 No. 73 JUSTICE Hamas’ s Violations of International Criminal Law Genocide Hamas carried out the October 7, 2023 attack as part of its stated plan to commit genocide against all Jews living in the State of Israel, in violation of Article 6 of the Rome Statute. The Hamas Covenant (1988) proclaims very clearly the organization’s goal of destroying Israel and committing genocide against the Jewish people. The Preamble to the Hamas Covenant declares that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”6 Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant states: [T]he Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take . . . The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.7 Hamas spokesperson Ghazi Hamed confirmed the organization’s genocidal intent in an interview with the LBC television network in Beirut on October 24, 2023. Hamed warned that the October 7 attack was only the beginning, and that Hamas would continue to strike Israel until it killed every Jew and destroyed the country.8 A Muslim physician who visited Israel as part of a delegation of human rights observers in late October 2023 described what he saw in an essay for the Wall Street Journal: One word continually came to mind: genocide. No matter how it emerges, the monster is easy to recognize. As a doctor, I had a rare and panoramic view of the aftermath: the targeted people’s long, agonizing journey to death . . . The Oct. 7 genocide was different, more barbaric than anything before it. The attacks were cloaked in the language and metaphors of Islam, yet corrupted with cosmic enmity for the Jewish people, Judaism, global Jewry and the Jewish state. They revealed again that Islamism is a virulent impostor of Islam with intentions anathema to the faith. And there was no doubt of Islamism’s guilt: I saw real-time footage generated by the Hamas commandos’ own GoPro cameras. I heard phone calls exclaiming the Shahadah—the Islamic declaration of faith—as they murdered, executed, burned, pillaged and then broadcast their crimes.9 Crimes Against Humanity The Hamas attack included the following crimes against humanity, in violation of Article 7 of the Rome Statute: murder, extermination; severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; rape; persecution against any identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, and religious grounds; enforced disappearance of persons; and other inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health. War Crimes The Hamas attack included the following war crimes in violation of Article 8 of the Rome Statute: willful killing; torture or inhuman treatment; willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health; extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; taking hostages; intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects; intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians; attacking or bombarding towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which 6. Hamas Covenant 1988, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, available at https://avalon.law. yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp 7. Id. 8. G. Pacchiani, “Hamas Official Says Group Will Repeat Oct. 7 Attack ‘Twice And Three Times’ To Destroy Israel,” TIMES OF ISRAEL (Nov. 1, 2023), available at https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamasofficial-says-group-will-repeat-oct-7-attack-twice-andthree-times-to-destroy-israel/ 9. Q.A. Ahmed, “The Scenes of Genocide I Saw in Israeli Morgues,” WALL ST. J. (Nov. 10, 2023), available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-scenes-of-genocidei-saw-in-israeli-morgues-hamas-oct-7-77d45c23?st=yl 0fuwnocwbj5zd&reflink=article_gmail_share
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