‘[The Geneva Convention] Treaty obligates all signatory nations not just not to commit genocide and punish it, but to prevent it.’
By Vered Weiss, World Israel New
A veteran war crimes prosecutor told The Jerusalem Post that Israel and other countries have the legal obligation to prevent Hamas from carrying out their stated goal of committing genocide against the Jewish People.
Former United States Justice Department Office of Special Investigations director Eli Rosenbaum’s 38-year career placed him in the role of prosecuting Rwandans, Russians, and Nazis for war crimes.
Rosenbaum said that not only does Israel have the right to eliminate Hamas, “but Israel has a legal obligation under international law as a signatory of the Genocide Convention [1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide].”
“The treaty obligates all signatory nations not just not to commit genocide and punish it, but to prevent it,” said Rosenbaum.
Hamas can be considered a genocidal group because its treaty states its aim to murder Jews and because Hamas’s leadership states it was committed to repeating the atrocities of October 7th again and again to destroy Israel.
In addition, the indiscriminate targeting of women, children, and elderly non-combatants on October 7th and the extent of the atrocities, according to Rosenbaum, didn’t merely show genocidal intent but were acts of genocide.
“Hamas intentionally carried out an attack that was so gruesome, so far beyond what anyone could have imagined in terms of cruelty, attacks that rivaled and even exceeded the cruelty seen at the hands of Nazi forces in World War II,” said Rosenbaum.
“And I feel fairly well qualified to opine on that, having studied and investigated and prosecuted Nazi cases for some 40 years,” he added.
Rosenbaum added that not only Israel has an obligation to stop Hamas, but “every country that signed the Genocide Convention, which is the vast majority of the countries of the world and that has the capability to act, has a treaty obligation that is an obligation under international law.”
However, he added that, apart from Israel, the United States is one of the few countries to take that obligation seriously.
He also pointed out that providing weapons to a terrorist group would be a violation of the agreement in the Geneva Convention.
Nevertheless, since the beginning of Israel’s war with Gaza, it seems that tables have been turned, and South Africa and other countries have accused Israel of genocide, a claim Rosenbaum dismisses as an “obscene falsehood.”
He explained that the definition of genocide is in reference to the goal of destroying all of a people or a significant part, not to the number of casualties.
“Genocide is not a crime that is based on numbers,” said Rosenbaum.
“If it were, then the allies would have committed genocide in the Battle of Manila with over 100,000 civilian deaths in World War II,” he explained.
“We would have committed genocide in Germany, where, just to speak of aerial bombing, not ground operations, by the British Royal Air Force and the then US Army Air Force, that combined bombing killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people.”
Rosenbaum concluded, “No one would say that the Allies committed genocide against Germans. That’s just absurd. Germany started a war. It was also a genocidal war, particularly against Jews and Roma, and they killed millions of people. The Allied military campaign is what brought an end to genocide.”