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The Scenes of Genocide I Saw in Israeli Morgues

(Wall Street Journal) Qanta A. Ahmed - I arrived on Oct. 19 to spend 10 days in Israel as a human-rights observer with the permission of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As an observant Muslim, I felt a duty to come and bear witness. What I saw will remain with me forever. I examined bodies and ashes, incinerated teeth and bones. I saw toddlers, teens and adults, young and old, many of them bound, tortured and burned alive. One word continually came to mind: genocide. This isn't the first time I have seen Islamist jihadism or even Islamist genocide. Yet the Oct. 7 genocide was more barbaric than anything before it. 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 heard phone calls exclaiming the Shahadah - the Islamic declaration of faith - as Hamas commandos murdered, executed, burned, pillaged and then broadcast their crimes. Article 6 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines genocide as a crime against humanity. Its essential element is intent "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." The Oct. 7 attack was premeditated, organized and targeted, seeking to destroy as many Israelis as possible. This was a methodically planned genocide. Eyewitnesses told me the terrorists came with tablets loaded with maps of the kibbutzim, blueprints and floor plans of homes, names of families and specific knowledge of service records and where Israeli veterans were living. The writer, a British-American Muslim, is Associate Professor of Medicine at the State University of New York.
2023-11-12 00:00:00
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