Israel is coercing Gaza families: “Cooperate or be killed”

Israeli soldiers in Gaza, earlier this month. (IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Reposted from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, September 27, 2025

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented a dangerous policy of extortion by Israeli forces against families in the Gaza Strip, presenting them with a catastrophic, no-win choice: either collaborate with the Israeli army and its militias, or face mass killing, starvation, and forcible displacement.

What began as individual extortion has escalated into a systematic, collective practice aimed at dismantling Palestinian social fabric by forcing people to betray their communities and subordinating survivors to survival conditions that destroy communal identity and resilience.

The pressure has shifted from targeting individuals to organized collective extortion that places entire families before a horrific equation: join militias created by Israel or face persecution, mass killing, starvation, and forced expulsion, a coordinated attempt to eliminate Palestinian society or reduce it to submission under occupation control.

Euro-Med Monitor received shocking testimonies from families who were forced to choose between remaining under siege and bombardment with no shelter, food, or medicines, and forced displacement into unknown conditions lacking basic life necessities, all under explicit threats of death if they refused Israeli orders. These testimonies show a deliberate policy to break civilian will by using fear and destruction as instruments of subjugation.

Other testimonies indicate that some Palestinian families were directly pressured to provide security cooperation to Israeli forces in exchange for being allowed to stay in certain areas or to receive basic assistance. This practice transforms humanitarian relief from an unconditional right into a tool of extortion and control, placing civilians’ lives on coercive bargaining tables and stripping them of fundamental protections.

Euro-Med Monitor documented a massacre carried out by the Israeli army at dawn today against the Bakr family in Al-Shati camp, west of Gaza City, which killed nine family members, including women and children.

This occurred one day after the family refused an Israeli demand to remain in place on the condition that its members form and serve in a local militia aligned with the army, similar to the Abu Shabab gang established east of Rafah. Euro-Med Monitor’s field team reported that Israeli forces have begun forming similar groups in multiple other areas of Gaza, including south Khan Younis, east Shuja’iyya, and Beit Lahia in the north.

Motasem Bakr, a resident of Gaza City, described how the family’s mukhtar was offered safety in return for his sons’ service in a militia. He refused and instructed his family to leave; they preferred sleeping in the streets rather than have their name recorded in family history as one who joined the road of betrayal.

Euro-Med Monitor also received reports that the Dairi and Daghmash families faced similar approaches. After they refused, the Israeli army intensified detonations of booby-trapped vehicles in the Sabra area and then carried out wide strikes that hit residential blocks, including the Daghmash family housing, resulting in more than sixty deaths in that family, many still under the rubble at the time of reporting.

Previously, Israel practiced such pressure on an individual basis by contacting some mukhtars and offering them roles in aid distribution and coordination with its forces; many mukhtars and community leaders who rejected these proposals were later directly targeted.

Euro-Med Monitor’s findings indicate that Israeli extortion has evolved into organised collective coercion, whereby the occupier seeks to build militias and gangs under its control to carry out unlawful tasks, including spreading chaos and theft, exploiting the profound social fragility caused by years of genocidal policy.

These practices clearly fall within the Rome Statute’s prohibitions, in particular, Article 8(2)(a)(5), which prohibits compelling civilians or prisoners to serve in hostile forces or to take part in operations for that force. Attempts to form local militias through threats of killing, displacement, or denial of essential aid constitute a clear breach of this provision and amount to a war crime.

Euro-Med Monitor reiterates that protection is unconditional and cannot be contingent on cooperation. Families’ refusal to submit to coercive bargains does not forfeit their right to protection nor justify any attack, displacement, or starvation. Forcing civilians into the “cooperate or be killed” choice is an extortion mechanism aimed at subjugation and systematic destruction of the Palestinian community’s ability to survive.

Given the pattern and context of these acts within Israel’s broader aggression on Gaza, the Monitor considers them part of a strategy aimed at dismantling Palestinian society — a grave indicator of genocidal intent through progressive destruction and weakening of collective survival capacity.

Euro-Med Monitor calls on the UN General Assembly to urgently adopt a resolution to establish and deploy a protection force in the Gaza Strip to halt crimes against civilians, secure unobstructed humanitarian access and distribution, protect medical and relief facilities, end the blockade, and begin reconstruction. Activating this path is a legal and moral duty of the international community to protect civilians in Gaza.

We urge all states, individually and collectively, to fulfill their legal obligations and act immediately to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza by all available means: to take concrete measures to protect Palestinian civilians; to ensure Israel’s compliance with international law and ICJ decisions; to implement arrest warrants already issued by the ICC against Israeli officials at the earliest opportunity; and to issue further arrest warrants and surrender suspects to international justice, without impunity.

We further call on states to impose economic, diplomatic and military measures against Israel for its systematic and grave breaches of international law — including arms embargoes and bans on dual-use exports, suspension of political, financial and military cooperation, targeted sanctions and asset freezes against responsible officials, travel bans, and suspension of preferential trade agreements — as effective measures to halt ongoing crimes.

Finally, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor urges the international community to address the root causes of Palestinian suffering accumulated over 77 years: to end the illegal Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, dismantle the apparatus of segregation and apartheid, ensure full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories of 1967, lift the unlawful siege on Gaza, hold perpetrators to account, and guarantee victims’ rights to reparation and redress.

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