US, EU Complicit in Whitewashing Israeli Crimes: Int’l NGO
ActionAid International, whose declared primary aim is to work against poverty and injustice worldwide, made the statement less than a week after Israeli airstrikes killed more than two dozen Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“Both the US and EU have publicly supported Israel’s right to ‘defend itself’ this week, demonstrating dangerous bias and deliberate obfuscation in their positions on the war,” the statement stressed, Press TV reported.
As Israel celebrates the 71th anniversary of its creation on Thursday, the latest figures show Israeli warplanes killed 27 Palestinians in two days and injured 154 more, including three women, two of them pregnant, and two babies, earlier this week.
ActionAid International hit out at Israel for “deliberately" targeting reporters, medics, women, children and infants, calling it a war crime.
The Israeli airstrikes, which commenced on Friday and continued into Sunday, left 130 houses completely destroyed and 700 more partially damaged, the NGO said.
It said 780 Palestinians are now displaced as a result of the recent escalation of targeted attacks against civilians, 44% of whom are children.
The airstrikes also either destroyed or damaged a mosque, four medical facilities, five media houses and ten civil institutions in the Gaza Strip, whose “catastrophic living conditions … are unbearable.”
The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli siege since June 2007, causing a decline in living standards as well as unprecedented unemployment and poverty.
Israel has also launched several wars on the Palestinian coastal strip, the last of which began in early July 2014. The military aggression, which ended on August 26, 2014, killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians. Over 11,100 others were also wounded in the war.
