Humanitarian access, hostage-prisoner exchanges, and implementation of Resolution 2735 (2024) are required to sustain the ceasefire – Letter from the State of Palestine (A/ES-10/1026-S/2025/160)

13 March 2025

Identical letters dated 13 March 2025 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

In grave breach of international law and all standards of humanity, Israel, the occupying Power, persists with its genocidal policies against the Palestinian people.

The Israeli Prime Minister and his cohorts in the government and military are again weaponizing starvation and dehydration against 2 million people in the besieged Gaza Strip with their deliberate decision to prohibit the entry of humanitarian aid, including food, water, medical care and other vital supplies, followed by a decision to cut off electricity to Gaza.

These flagrant acts of mass collective punishment have again plunged Gaza into darkness. Dashing the sense of relief and hope brought by the ceasefire, want, fear and hunger are again on the rise. Israel is clearly intent on inflicting more harm on innocent children, women and men, further weakening their ability to cope with the extreme hardships caused by its illegal occupation and ability to survive its genocidal aggressions.

After barely resuming with the ceasefire, vital civilian services will again be crippled. This includes the operation of hospitals, sanitation services and water desalination plants, as well as the operation of bakeries and the refrigeration of food stocks and medicines. The lack of water – with 9 out of every 10 people left without access to clean water – and of sanitation and hygiene supplies is directly threatening the population’s health, accelerating the spread of infections and disease, thwarting the recovery of the injured and compounding suffering, particularly among women and girls, who are enduring untold indignations. That this is being committed in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan renders Israel’s unlawful actions even more cruel.

These acts by Israel constitute flagrant violations of the ceasefire agreement and Security Council resolution 2735 (2024), as well as numerous other relevant resolutions and the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice that have demanded a halt to such illegal policies and actions and respect by Israel of its legal obligations, including as the occupying Power under international humanitarian law. Moreover, depriving an entire people of life’s essentials, endangering their survival and hastening their destruction as a people, in whole or in part, constitute blatant acts of genocide.

As part and parcel of this policy, Israel carries on with its onslaught against the Palestinian civilian population in the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Military raids and settler attacks across the West Bank continue to cause Palestinian casualties, destroy homes and other civilian infrastructure and forcibly displace civilians, in addition to the tens of thousands already displaced.

Last week, Israeli occupying forces demolished another 16 buildings in the Nur al-Shams refugee camp, causing vast destruction similar to the ravaging of the Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps and the apocalyptic destruction caused by the Israeli occupying forces to refugee camps across Gaza since October 2023.

These illegal actions reflect a clear policy and pattern aimed at wiping out the camps and forcibly transferring millions of refugees who have already lived their entire lives in conditions of displacement. Israel does not hide this nefarious objective. Just as it has denied Palestine refugees their rights to return to their ancestral homes and lands for 76 years, it now denies their return to the refugee camps in the northern West Bank.

The aim is one and the same: pushing Palestinians out of their homes and forcing them off their land, depriving the indigenous people of their rightful patrimony and right to self-determination. Ethnic cleansing and colonization have been the policies pursued in tandem by Israel for decades, with Israeli officials now explicitly declaring plans to force them out of Occupied Palestine forever, if not by its genocidal aggressions then through collective punishment and coercion schemes or through what it has now dubbed “voluntary migration” and is feverishly pursuing in this ongoing Nakba against our people.

The international community cannot stand idly by while these gravest of crimes are perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people and must act collectively to stop this inhumanity and impunity. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people must be halted, and the magnitude of this catastrophe, the human suffering that it has inflicted and the regional destabilization that it has caused must be addressed without delay.

Of immediate priority must be the resumption of unfettered humanitarian access through all crossing points to ensure that aid reaches all civilians in need. This must be coupled with urgent efforts to sustain the ceasefire, including the continued exchange of hostages and prisoners and their return to their families, as called for by resolution 2735 (2024), and to ensure the ceasefire’s permanence in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory in order to de-escalate this extremely dangerous situation.

We thus reiterate our calls on the international community, including the Security Council, the General Assembly and the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, to uphold their duties and act now to enforce the rule of law, including by ensuring protection and sustenance to the Palestinian people in their homeland and accountability for all the crimes perpetrated, and to pave a path for a political horizon that will bring an end to this abhorrent, illegal occupation and lay the foundations for a just peace based on international law, human rights and the actualization of the two-State solution.

The present letter is in follow-up to our 859 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 6 March 2025 (A/ES-10/1025-S/2025/140), 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