Gaza - Saba:
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said on Tuesday that after 21 months of ongoing Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, Palestinians there are left with less than 15% of the Strip's area, or no more than 55 square kilometers.
The monitor explained in a statement on Tuesday that approximately 2.3 million people are crammed into this area, in stifling conditions where each person is given less than 24 square meters of space—less than even what was granted to Guantanamo prisoners.
It noted that residents are being held in this cramped space under bombardment and siege, lacking water, food, shelter, and healthcare, and effectively prevented from returning to their destroyed or prohibited areas of origin, according to the Palestinian SAFA News Agency.
The Monitor explained that this is part of a deliberate policy embodying a genocidal operation carried out by Israel to uproot a people and erase their physical and demographic presence from their land through mass killing, forced displacement, starvation, and the systematic destruction of life.
It explained that the established reality, as the Israeli aggression enters its twenty-first consecutive month, is that the Gaza Strip is no longer merely subjected to bombing and killing, but rather to a comprehensive process of erasure.
It pointed out that the population is now treated as detainees in a mass detention camp, forced to live in a suffocating area of no more than 55 square kilometers, subject to strict military surveillance and direct targeting.
The Monitor stated that Israel has transformed approximately 85% of the Gaza Strip into closed areas through forced displacement orders or illegal military control, as part of a deliberate policy aimed at obliterating the Palestinian population in Gaza by uprooting its residents, undermining human life, and dismantling the social and geographical structure of the Strip.
It explained that the residents live in this narrow, destroyed area, targeted around the clock, and deprived of even the most basic services, under unprecedented overcrowding.
It reported that the average population density is approximately 40,000 people per square kilometer, while the Al-Mawasi area alone has more than 47,000 people per square kilometer, a density unparalleled in any populated area on earth.
It stated that these are not abstract numbers, but rather the manifestations of an ongoing Israeli crime committed in broad daylight, in full view of the entire world. This crime involves forcibly isolating residents and repeatedly expelling them from their original areas, then from their displacement areas, to what the Israeli forces call "humanitarian and safe areas," only to reveal each time that these are nothing more than new death traps.
The Monitor noted that all families in the Gaza Strip were forcibly displaced, and that most of them were moved five, six, or even ten or more times, in a scene that epitomizes a systematic and ongoing policy of mass persecution in search of nonexistent safety.
It noted that this policy aims to bring about comprehensive demographic change and transform Gaza into an area devoid of its original inhabitants, subject to complete military control and surrounded by a stifling, illegal blockade.
It added that the data it documented up to the beginning of July 2025 shows that Israel destroyed more than 92% of the homes in the Gaza Strip, inflicted total or partial damage to more than 80% of the schools and 90% of the hospitals, and completely destroyed all of the universities in the Strip.
"Entire neighborhoods, cities, villages, and camps no longer exist. They have been completely wiped off the map, with all their homes, streets, institutions, markets, mosques, and even memories physically removed from existence, in an approach clearly aimed at preventing any possibility of return."
The Euro-Med Monitor warned that what distinguishes this phase from previous ones is its more dangerous and widespread nature, targeting 2.3 million people who have been subjected to comprehensive genocide and deprived of the most basic rights, under systematic coercive conditions characterized by extreme cruelty, complete dehumanization, and the most basic living conditions.
It called on all states to recognize that what the residents of the Gaza Strip are being subjected to is not an expulsion operation, but rather the systematic erasure of an entire people.
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