The European Parliament on Thursday called for the Hamas terror group to be “eliminated” in a scathing rebuke of its devastating onslaught on southern Israel on October 7.
In a non-binding resolution passed 500-21, the body demanded the “unconditional release” of hostages held in Gaza, blasting their kidnapping as a war crime while expressing sympathy for civilian victims on both sides of the conflict.
The parliament “condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the despicable terrorist attacks committed by the terrorist group Hamas against Israel and expresses its support for the State of Israel and its people [and] reiterates that the terrorist organization Hamas needs to be eliminated.”
War erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw at least 1,500 terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,400 people and seizing over 200 hostages of all ages and several nationalities under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities
The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — men, women, children and the elderly. Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 260 were slaughtered at an outdoor festival, many amid horrific acts of brutality by the terrorists, in what US President Joe Biden has highlighted as “the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”