NGO Action News — 4 September 2025

This newsletter informs about recent and upcoming activities of Civil Society Organizations working on the question of Palestine. The Committee and the Division for Palestinian Rights of the UN Secretariat provide the information “as is” without warranty of any kind, and do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, or reliability of the information contained in the websites linked in the newsletter.

Middle East

• On 2 September, 7amleh released the report “Meta’s Role in Amplifying Harmful Content During Genocide in Gaza.” According to the NGO, the report exposed the failure of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to protect Palestinians from incitement and hate speech in Hebrew, and the company’s biased policies and complicity in enabling such discourse during Israel’s war on Gaza. The report also called on Meta to immediately invest in effective infrastructure for content moderation, develop fair classifiers to detect hate speech and incitement, and take urgent human rights due diligence and risk assessment measures.
• On 2 September, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights published the article “Israel’s Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law in the West Bank in August 2025”. The NGO stated that settlement activities and settlers’ attacks against Palestinian civilians and their lands increased in August 2025, as the Israeli authorities approved the widescale E1 settlement plan in occupied East Jerusalem, which, it argued, is part of Israel’s strategy to expand settlements and completely sever the northern occupied West Bank from its southern parts.
• On 1 September, Gisha published the article “Another school year lost”, stating that more than 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured over the course of the current war. The article reads that the education system has been at a complete standstill for nearly two years, and now for a third academic year, approximately 685,000 students will not be returning to school.
• On 1 September, Al Mezan released the report “Kill the Witness, Hide the Crimes: Israel’s Campaign of Silencing Palestinian Journalists and Media Workers to Conceal the Gaza Genocide”, documenting violations committed by Israeli forces and authorities against Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza, during the period 7 October 2023 to
  30 June 2025. The NGO added that this campaign of violence, directed by Israeli authorities at the highest political and military levels formed part of a deliberate effort to silence the documentation, reporting, and public exposure of Israeli atrocities committed against Palestinians.
• On 29 August, Badil issued a press release headlined “Widespread Famine in the Gaza Strip is the Direct Result of States’ Complicity and Inaction”, arguing that States have contributed to what the NGO considers to be a genocide committed against Palestinians, due to their failure to act, uphold their legal and moral obligations, and enforce accountability against the perpetrators of a famine in Gaza. The NGO also called on States to provide political and financial support to UNRWA.
• On 25 August, Physicians for Human Rights published an article stressing that the collapse of Gaza’s health system and the breakdown of essential services have created a vicious cycle where infectious diseases and malnutrition reinforced each other. The article reads that the few hospitals that remained functional were unequipped to meet the population’s urgent needs, particularly those of thousands of children and pregnant or breastfeeding women requiring advanced care.

Africa, Asia and Europe

• On 27 August, Law For Palestine published a summary of the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”. According to the NGO, this report documents the critical role that corporations have played in driving Israel’s erasure of the Palestinian people from their land, contributing to a process of displacement and replacement and profiting from decades of human rights violations and international crimes.

North America

• On 2 September, J Street issued a statement criticizing the United States’ decision to deny visas to Palestinian passport holders as well as to Palestinian leaders ahead of the UN General Assembly’s 80th session. The NGO called on the U.S. Administration to reverse this decision.
• On 29 August, Friends of Sabeel North America published an article on the media coverage of Israel’s violations in Gaza. Taking the example on the recent Israeli attack on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, which had caused the death of dozens of Palestinians, the NGO claimed that western media did not exercise required neutrality in reporting on Palestine, and as such were complicit in the violations committed against Palestinians.

United Nations

• On 10 September, the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will convene a meeting in the ECOSOC Chamber at UNHQ in New York, at 3 p.m. The Committee will receive briefings by the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine and Palestinian civil society representatives on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem. The meeting will be broadcast live on UN Web TV.
• On 29 August, the UNRWA Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, called for a ceasefire in Gaza City, amid increased military Israeli activity in the enclave’s largest city. People living in Gaza were now in a declared state of famine and under the threat of a major military offensive, with a total evacuation of an extremely weakened population, he added. He further informed that, in addition to dispensing at least 15,000 medical consultations a day at UNRWA primary health centers, the UN agency screened children for acute malnutrition, managed waste management to prevent spreading communicable diseases and worked to give access to safe drinking water.
• On 29 August, spokespersons of WHO and OCHA held a press briefing to repeat urgent warnings of an ongoing famine and a likely rise in preventable disease in Gaza, linked to the dire living conditions. The agencies raised concerns over the ongoing devastating impact of Israeli aid restrictions impacting humanitarian relief supplies entering the Strip. WHO highlighted the growing risk of communicable diseases in Gaza, with 94 suspected cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome now reported, a disease which can cause paralysis and is treatable in hospitals, but added that the treatments were currently at zero stock.
• On 28 August, the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People held its 424th meeting at UN headquarters. During the meeting, France and Saudi Arabia briefed participants on the progress of the High-level International Conference on the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, emphasizing the need for the widest possible participation of Member States in endorsing the Outcome Document of the conference’s July session, ahead of its resumption on 22 September. The Director of the UNRWA Liaison Office in New York also briefed, highlighting the catastrophic situation in Gaza and the wider OPT and calling for ongoing substantive funding of the Agency. The Committee also adopted its 2025 Annual Report to the General Assembly.