Attendees of the 16th Genocide Memorial Day (GMD) in London last weekend passed a resolution requiring GMD to urge all faith leaders to ensure that Holocaust Memorials also include the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The annual Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) will take place on Monday 27 January but will not include Gaza in the list of genocides it will commemorate despite a call by the Islamic Human Rights Commission for it to mark “the genocide of our time”.

So far at least 46,000 people have been killed and thousands more injured in Gaza, many of them maimed for life. Some 40% of the victims are children and another 30% women. The territory itself has been decimated by relentless Israeli bombardment.

The International Court of Justice is investigating Israel for genocide while many nations, human rights groups and experts have concluded that Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter and destruction meets the legal definition of genocide. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) have all concluded that Israel has committed genocide.

The resolution reiterates that Holocaust Memorial Day is not a symbolic exercise in remembering historical atrocities. At the heart of HMD is the principle of “Never Again” – namely that humanity must prevent the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust from ever happening again. But if we exclude the Gaza genocide, it renders that pledge meaningless.

It states: “As religious leaders, we have a moral duty to uphold the sanctity of all human life, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or political conviction. We disavow, unequivocally, the unjustified killing of fellow human beings. We believe that all human life has equal value. There is no scale of human suffering by which any one genocide should rank higher than others.”

The full text of the resolution is available to view here.

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