Statement of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs (ECFA) Condemning the Israeli Bombing of “Al-Taabi’een School”

ECFA condemns, in the strongest terms, the Israeli occupation forces’ targeting, at dawn on Saturday, August 10^th, 2024, of the “Al-Taabi’een” school, which shelters displaced people in Al-Daraj neighborhood, east of Gaza City, which resulted in the death of more than 100 displaced people, and the injury of dozens of innocent civilians. This horrific massacre reaffirms the barbarism of the occupying forces and their Government, which did not hesitate to bomb the school while the displaced were performing dawn prayers. It also stresses that there is no announcement of any safe place in the besieged Gaza Strip, which has been groaning under the weight of the aggression that has been going on for ten months, amid the shameful inability of the international community, especially the United Nations Security Council, which is entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining international peace and security, and imposing respect for the temporary measures ordered by the International Court of Justice in its successive orders since January 26, based on a lawsuit South Africa, which many countries have joined, against Israel, to prevent the crime of genocide, to which the Palestinian people are subjected.

ECFA stresses that the Israeli bombardment represents a flagrant violation of the basic principles of international humanitarian law and UN Security Council Resolution 2601, which stresses the need to protect classrooms during the conflict and condemns all attacks against schools, children and teachers. It also stresses that the persistence of the occupying forces’ deliberate killing of Palestinians is conclusive evidence of their intention to exterminate the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and force them to forcibly displace them from their land

In this context, the Council deplores the continued reckless supply of weapons and equipment to the extremist Zionist government by the United States and its European allies to help it continue its brutal aggression against the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that the number of victims of unarmed civilians has reached about 40,000, most of them women and children. The Council calls on the ICC to urgently issue arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and his Minister of Defence, in the context of the availability of “documented evidence” that the Government of Israel committed “intentional killing, murder as a war crime, intentional attacks against the civilian population as a war crime, and extermination, including in the context of starvation death, and persecution as a crime against humanity”, as the ICC Prosecutor confirmed in his statement issued on 20 May last, calling on the Court to issue the said arrest warrants.