Jews have “a moral obligation,” Israeli Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef said, to attempt to halt what he described as a genocide occurring in Syria.

“I have said in the past and I will say it again, what’s happening in Syria is genocide of women and children in its cruelest form, using weapons of mass destruction,” Yosef wrote, as reported by The Times of Israel. “We have a moral obligation not to keep quiet and to try and stop this massacre.”

As they had been killed on a mass scale, Jews must seek to stop the homicides, Yosef emphasized, according to The Times of Israel.

“As Jews who have experienced genocide, as Jews whose Torah is a light to the nations, it is our moral obligation to try and stop this murder. It is an obligation no less important than the moral obligation to destroy [the] nuclear reactor in Syria,” he remarked, speaking of a Sept. 2007 Israeli attack that took out the reactor the Bashar al-Assad regime was building in the Syrian desert, The Times of Israel reported.

Yosef’s statements followed a chemical attack believed to have taken place in Douma, a town of rebels, over Saturday and Sunday, which murdered scores of folks, according to The Times of Israel.

Featured image credit: Tsafrir Abayov AP Images

Douma, the final rebel territory in Eastern Ghouta, suffered under airstrikes, with 70 folks being murdered in about a days’ time, with 11 civilians becoming privy to respiratory issues. Medical-emergency personnel have blamed entities serving al-Assad of utilizing chlorine gas, which is toxic, to assault the region, northeast of Damascus, The Times of Israel reported.

Medical emergency personnel affiliated with the rebels, called White Helmets, signaled that the assault occurred, indicating that families were discovered in their residencies to have been cut off from air. They said that more than 40 died that way, as the folks seemed to have been poisoned by gas since they had foamed at the mouth, with their pupils dilated. However, another statement indicated that chlorine had been detected, which fails to provide a description of those signs of the problem, according to The Times of Israel.

Featured image credit: Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets AP Images

Yosef made remarks about terrible things occurring in Syria in 2016 that echoed those he made Sunday. He was in an interfaith conference with Palestinian Muslim clerics, by President Reuven Rivlin.

“He said the world must not be silent in the face of the atrocities taking place in the country that has been consumed by civil war since 2011,” The Times of Israel reported.

“Every day not far from here, as we sit here, men, women and children are murdered in Syria, and particularly in Aleppo,” Yosef remarked in the conference. “Millions of refugees are homeless, hundreds of thousands of others are starved, under siege. They are not our friends, but they are human beings who are suffering a small holocaust.”

Yosef said that Jews especially, who saw six million of their people killed in suffering through the Holocaust, absolutely should not do as “the world” did then, when it “looked on and remained silent,” The Times of Israel reported.

“As Jews, we must not stay silent,” Yosef said. “The call must be heard from here: A genocide will not be allowed to go by quietly — not in Syria and not anywhere else, and not against any people.”