US Muslim group demands Biden administration address Israeli war crimes

By Zehra Nur Duz

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the US’ largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, urged the Biden administration to address Israeli war crimes after soldiers destroyed a Gaza water reservoir and new reports of torture at a prison.

“Every day that the Biden administration provides financial, diplomatic and military support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, War Criminal Netanyahu feels emboldened to carry out even more human rights abuse like blowing up a water reservoir and raping detainees with electric rods,” CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement Monday.

“The Biden administration must break its silence, enforce its own red line, and stop sending weapons to support the Israeli government’s ethnic cleansing, mass destruction, forced starvation, and genocide in Gaza,” said Mitchell.

“We don’t just need occasional moments of softer rhetoric. We need action,” he added.

Israel faced a new wave of war crimes accusations Monday after footage showed troops demolishing a drinking water reservoir in the southern Gaza Strip, along with gruesome reports of a Palestinian detainee being gang-raped.

A force in Rafah from the 401st Brigade of the Armored Corps “blew up the central reservoir last week on the orders of the brigade commanders,” according to the Haaretz newspaper.

Separately, Israeli media reported Monday that 10 soldiers gang-raped a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman Prison in the Negev desert in southern Israel.

Public broadcaster KAN, citing a security source, said the detainee was taken to a hospital with severe injuries to an intimate body part that left him unable to walk.

“Police investigators arrived at Sde Teiman to detain the soldiers, according to KAN.

Several reports emerged about severe abuses against Palestinian detainees at the notorious facility since the start of Israel's assault on Gaza in early October.

Israel's Supreme Court is considering a petition filed by Israeli human rights organizations to close the Sde Teiman prison, where Palestinian detainees from Gaza face torture and medical neglect.

In recent months, the army has released dozens of detainees from Gaza in deteriorating health conditions, with their bodies bearing the scars of torture.