Washington DC: The US Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, has said that there is no evidence of Israel carrying genocide in Gaza. The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, on Tuesday also criticised the international community for failing to hold Hamas accountable, according to The Times of Israel.
However, both officials insisted that Israel must guarantee long-term improvements to the humanitarian situation in the enclave. Austin in a testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee regarding US President Joe Biden’s latest Budget request said that there was no evidence of genocide being created.
Austin’s statement came a day after Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren shared a video on her social media handle, asserting that the International Court of Justice should find Israel guilty of genocide because there was “ample evidence”. Austin referred to the horrors carried out by Hamas on October 7 as a “war crime” but refrained from calling them a genocide at the hearing on Tuesday.
Several senators expressed their outrage at the civilian deaths and insisted that more was needed to be done by the administration to put pressure on Israel to save the Gaza population. Six months have elapsed since Hamas launched a brutal onslaught on Israel, resulting in widespread devastation and loss of life. Despite the passage of time, 134 hostages remain in Hamas’ captivity, their fate is hanging in the balance amidst the ongoing efforts to secure their release.
Meanwhile, as Israel marked six months of war against Hamas, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has published new data on its operations in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon, highlighting everything from the number of terror operatives killed to the number of sites struck.
According to the data, more than 13,000 Hamas operatives and members of other terror groups have been killed by the IDF in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7, when gunmen rampaged through southern communities, massacring some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 253 to Gaza. As per the data, the military has killed five Hamas brigade commanders and those of an equivalent rank, as well as more than 20 battalion commanders. Since October 7, in the West Bank, more than 3,700 Palestinians, including 1,600 plus affiliated with Hama, have been arrested.
