The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli airstrike that has assassinated the Director General of Police in the Gaza Strip, Major General Mahmoud Salah, and Member of the Police Command Council, Major General Husam Shahwan, in the so-called “humanitarian safe zone”, west of Khan Yunis. The Israeli Occupying Forces continues its targeted attacks on civil police officers and directors upon a decision by the highest political and military echelons in Israel as part of its genocidal campaign ongoing for 15 months now on the Gaza Strip. Through these attacks, IOF intends to throw Gaza deeper into chaos, spread organized crimes, deepen the human suffering, and undermine any effort to achieve minimum levels of security, rendering it an integral part of Israel’s crime of genocide.

According to PCHR’s field documentation in Khan Yunis, at approximately 01:15 on Thursday, 02 January 2025, IOF’s warplanes fired at least five missiles at displaced people’s tents in two areas; each area is only around 200 meters away from the other, in al-Ehsan displacement camp in al-‘Attar area, southwest of al-Mawasi area in Khan Yunis. As a result, ten people were killed, including 5 children, a woman and Major General Mahmoud Salah and his deputy Major General Husam Shahwan.

PCHR’s Director, Lawyer Raji al-Sourani, has commented: “Civil police and its chiefs are part of the civil services, and any attack on them is a war crime. In the context of its crime of genocide and by targeting police, Israel intents to throw total chaos and insecurity amid the spread of looting, famine, poverty, and displacement so that the rule of jungle would prevail, triggering mass forced migration from the Gaza Strip.”

Since the onset of the genocide on the Gaza Strip, the IOF have systematically and deliberately targeted and destroyed all civil police stations and headquarters and killed hundreds of police officers and chiefs. PCHR has also documented the targeting of security teams, which guard the humanitarian aid convoys with IOF having the same intent to spread chaos and crime and exacerbate the human suffering. Such attacks fall under the crime of genocide for deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.

PCHR reiterates that IOF’s targeted attacks on civil police headquarters and officers is deeply entrenched in Israel’s political and security doctrine over years, as police headquarters have been repeatedly targeted in every Israeli military aggression launched on the Gaza Strip. In this context, PCHR also recalls when IOF’s bombardment of the police headquarters in Gaza on 27 December 2008, killing at the time the Director General of Police, Major General Tawfiq Jaber, and dozens of other police officers. The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission, headed by jurist Richard Goldstone, dedicated a significant part of its investigation to the attacks on police facilities during the 2008 aggression. The mission concludes that attacks on police stations violate international law.

PCHR condemns IOF’s ongoing crimes against civil police officers, chiefs and headquarters and affirms that impunity, along with the military and political support provided by Israel’s Western Allies, encourage Israel to continue committing the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people, including the persistent attacks on the civil police.