Call to international community for action against threat to the international legal order, peace and security – Letter from the State of Palestine (A/ES-10/1013-S/2024/743)

14 October 2024

Identical letters dated 14 October 2024 from the Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, the President of the General Assembly and the President of the Security Council

Israel is decimating hospitals, schools, shelters, tent encampments.

Israel is decimating babies, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, youth, the disabled, the wounded and entire families, some burned alive before the eyes of their loved ones.

Israel is decimating refugees, chasing and tormenting the displaced, as they run from one place to another in a vain attempt to escape its genocidal reach.

Israel is decimating humanitarians, health workers, journalists.

Israel is decimating Gaza, decimating all that lives and all that sustains life.

Israel is decimating international humanitarian law and the foundations of the post-World War II, law-based international order.

Israel is a rogue State, committing these war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide openly, threatening more death, more destruction, more displacement. Using false and racist pretexts, classifying everyone as “terrorists”, it is accelerating its sinister plans, executing every threat with brazen impunity, certain it will not be stopped, that the complicity of those arming and supporting it will continue to shield it from consequences at all costs.

What else can explain the Israeli occupying forces’ escalating savagery in the northern Gaza Strip, where the lives of 400,000 Palestinian children, women and men are in danger? What else can explain Israel’s siege of Jabaliya refugee camp, its methodical killing, maiming, starving of civilians?

In these past 10 days, Israel has committed countless massacres. Over 200 Palestinians have been killed, slaughtered in the streets, charred in hospitals, crushed under rubble. Terrified families face repeated “evacuation orders” yet know there is no place safe to go, many staying in their homes rather than uprooting their families again, facing certain death at the hands of Israel’s blood-thirsty soldiers.

This is happening in broad daylight, with the full awareness of the international community. The casualty toll in Gaza has now surpassed 42,227 Palestinians killed and 98,464 injured.

Yet Israel carries on, confident that it can continue to evade accountability, that those who continue to support it and justify its crimes will absorb the consequences, even at the cost of their own credibility, stature and national interests, allowing Israel to pursue its criminal plans with no deterrent.

What else could explain Israel’s decision to intensify its attacks on every single civilian object in northern Gaza, its attempts to wipe out entire refugee camps, leaving no home, no United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) shelter, no hospital, no displaced community unscathed?

What else could explain its decision to block all humanitarian access for the past 10 days, besieging the Jabaliya refugee camp, deliberately depriving the civilian population of food, water and medicine, escalating its weaponization of starvation and humanitarian aid to new, depraved levels?

Israel believes it can annihilate the Palestinian people, violently disposing of an entire people and their rights, without anyone ever acting to stop it. It believes it will never be held accountable for any of these crimes. It believes it can commit ethnic cleansing, forced starvation and annexation, in breach of its obligations as the occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention and of the most minimal standards of human decency and morality, without any consequences whatsoever.

It believes that it can break, piece by piece, the international system in all its components – from the legal, to the political, to the security, to the humanitarian – attempting to destroy it all before it is ever once forced to pay the price for its atrocities.

It believes it can shred the Charter of the United Nations, defy every Security Council and General Assembly resolution, forcibly render international humanitarian law and human rights law null and void, without cost. The absence of accountability enables and emboldens its wanton impunity, feeding its belief that it is a State above the law, fuelling its belief in its exceptionalism and supremacy.

What else can explain its intensifying attacks on UNRWA, the literal lifeline for the 2 million Palestinian civilians besieged and struggling to survive Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and what else could explain its all-out assault on the United Nations as a whole, its attempts to eliminate any form of sustenance for the Palestinian people and remove any remaining witnesses to these unspeakable crimes?

What else can explain the open calls by Israeli politicians and the exposed plans of the Israeli government to annex north Gaza, in flagrant violation of the Charter prohibition on acquisition of territory by force and scores of United Nations resolutions? Likewise, what else can explain its plans to seize the UNRWA compound in East Jerusalem and the shameless calls to build a settlement upon it? What else can explain 57 years of this illegal colonial occupation and its mutation into apartheid and genocide?

Israel must be proven wrong. It must be shown – not only in words, but in deeds – that the rest of the world will not continue standing idly by as Israel commits genocide and threatens to engulf the entire Middle East and far beyond the region in flames.

Its twisted justifications, repugnant propaganda and sabre-rattling must be called out and rejected, immediately and forcefully, with no equivocation, no exceptions to the rule of law. This is not about security and not about “self-defence”; this is about Israel’s goal to erase the Palestinian people, to erase the Palestinian State, to destroy the two-State solution and establish “Greater Israel”.

Israel must be shown that the international community will act to uphold the pledge of “never again” and will act to protect the Palestinian people, the Lebanese people, the Israeli people and all the people of this region from the scourge of war that the extremist Israeli Prime Minister and his government and military commanders insist on sowing, a war of genocide in the twenty-first century.

It must be shown that the rest of the world stands for the international legal order and will not remain silent as Israel attempts to destroy UNRWA, destroy the United Nations, destroy the laws of war enshrined 75 years ago in the Geneva Conventions to protect humankind from precisely the kind of savagery Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people every single day for over a year now, without end.

It must be confronted with action, collectively and individually, by all States who refuse to surrender to the grim reality and law of the jungle that Israel seeks to impose. There must be concrete measures, including legal action, sanctions and a halt to all arms transfers to Israel to stop the endless flow of weapons enabling this genocide and the widening of its war on every front. Israel’s systematic breaches of the fundamental obligations underpinning United Nations membership require that the international community draw the necessary conclusions and act accordingly.

As we called for just days ago at the one-year mark of this gruesome genocide, we call again for the protection of our people in Gaza and in the rest of Occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem, and for a stop to their decimation by Israel. There must be immediate action to stop Israel’s criminal rampage in Occupied Palestine, in Lebanon and across the region, to save the millions of human lives endangered by Israel’s nefarious plans, to stop the descent into the dark abyss that the Israeli Prime Minister and his coalition of extremists and criminals are dragging us all into.

The international community must confront this betrayal of humanity and mortal threat to the international legal order and international peace and security with every legitimate tool at its disposal. To the Security Council, the General Assembly, every peace-loving nation, we appeal: do not forsake your legal, political, humanitarian and moral obligations.

This letter is in follow-up to our 849 letters on the ongoing crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, which constitutes the territory of the State of Palestine. These letters, dated from 29 September 2000 (A/55/432–S/2000/921) to 8 October 2024 (A/ES-10/1012–S/2024/719), constitute a basic record of the crimes being committed by Israel, the occupying Power, against the Palestinian people since September 2000. For all of these war crimes, acts of State terrorism and systematic human rights violations against our people, Israel, the occupying Power, must be held accountable and the perpetrators must be brought to justice. This illegal colonial occupation and apartheid regime must end now.

I should be grateful if you would arrange to have the present letter distributed as a document of the tenth emergency special session of the General Assembly, under agenda item 5, and of the Security Council.

(Signed) Riyad Mansour

Minister

Permanent Observer