Letter from the State of Palestine Calls on International Community to uphold rule of law and advance the Two-State Solution – (A/ES-10/1048-S/2025/701)

31 October 2025

Identical letters dated 31 October 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

The long-awaited, yet extremely fragile, ceasefire in Gaza is in need of greater international support and action, including to demand and press for a halt of Israel’s violations of the ceasefire agreement and to ensure the survival of the starved, displaced and traumatized Palestinian population.

Since the ceasefire agreement came into effect on 10 October 2025, following the mediation efforts of the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Türkiye and with broad international support, Israel has committed hundreds of violations. In the span of the past three weeks, Israeli occupying forces have killed 211 Palestinians in Gaza and caused further destruction.

This includes the murder of at least 104 people in one night of Israeli air strikes and bombings across Gaza on 29 October. The victims of these Israeli attacks included 46 children and 20 women. These souls are now among the over 68,000 Palestinians killed in this genocidal war on our people. Still unaccounted for are the bodies of the thousands of Palestinians killed in Israeli bombardments who have yet to be recovered from under the tons of rubble caused by its mass destruction of Gaza.

Hundreds more civilians have been wounded since the ceasefire was agreed, surpassing 170,000 Palestinians injured in Israeli attacks. Most of the wounded and maimed continue to suffer without the acute medical care they need, which still cannot be provided by Gaza’s decimated health system, as Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid, including medical supplies and equipment, continue despite the ceasefire agreement and the absolute necessity to immediately scale up assistance in all parts of Gaza.

We appeal to the international community, particularly the mediating countries, to demand an immediate and complete halt to violations of the ceasefire. We urge that all efforts be exerted to preserve and sustain this fragile ceasefire and to ensure that the agreement is respected and implemented, with a view to alleviating the suffering of the population, facilitating the recovery and reconstruction so desperately needed and accelerating Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza. Moreover, we call again for the ceasefire to become permanent and to be extended beyond Gaza to the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, to protect human life and prevent more Palestinian children, women and men from falling victim to this illegal Israeli occupation.

In this regard, I regret to inform you that Israeli occupying forces and Israeli settlers have continued their violent raids and attacks throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, terrorizing the population, killing, injuring and destroying. This includes the killing of a 14-year-old boy, Yamen Hamed, yesterday in the village of Silwad, north-east of Ramallah, and a 9-year-old boy, Mohammed Bahjat Al‑Hallaq, who was killed while playing football with his friends in Rihiyah, near the city of Al-Khalil.

As reported by the United Nations human rights office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, of the over 1,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers in the West Bank since October 2023, 1 out of every 5 victims has been a child, amounting to 206 boys and 7 girls. The casualties also include 20 women and at least 7 disabled persons, but does not include Palestinians who died in captivity in Israeli detention. The casualty toll represents 43 per cent of all Palestinians killed by Israel in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in the past 20 years, underscoring Israel’s escalating lethality against the Palestinian people.

At the same time, Israel still carries on with all its unlawful policies and measures in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, systematically violating international law and United Nations resolutions and trampling on the International Court of Justice advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, which demanded an end to this illegal occupation. Instead, Israeli occupying forces continue to operate hand in glove with terrorist settler gangs to chase Palestinian communities off their land, carrying out daily raids on villages and towns, attacking civilians, including olive harvesters, destroying Palestinian properties and orchards, stealing livestock and seizing Palestinian land.

These crimes are part and parcel of Israeli settlement activities, which press on unabated, and Israeli officials continue to declare their aims to bury the two-State solution. Finance Minister Smotrich recently boasted again about the looming approval of another 2,000 new settlement units in the West Bank, a day after approving 1,300 settlements, bringing the total of settlement construction announced this year to nearly 30,000 units, to which hundreds of thousands more Israeli settlers will be illegally transferred in our land. These are illegal acts of colonization, which are clearly intended to entrench the Israeli occupation and destroy the two-State solution, and they must be stopped forthwith.

Israel obviously continues to reject the path of peace and insists on continuing to wage war on our people by all means. The international community must act with urgency to put a halt to these war crimes and crimes against humanity and hold Israel fully accountable, in accordance with international law. There must be no complicity with, no support for and no arming of this illegal colonial apartheid occupation.

There can be no justification for the continuation of Israel’s wanton attacks on the Palestinian people. International humanitarian law forbids it, and the ceasefire agreement clearly does not allow for the slaughter of Palestinians whenever the Israeli Prime Minister and his extremist coalition desire. Nor do either allow for Israel’s continued deprivation of the population under false pretexts and offensive conditionalities on humanitarian aid. Israel must stop violating the ceasefire agreement and lift its illegal blockade and life-strangling restrictions now.

In this regard, we welcome the 22 October 2025 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, which underscored binding legal obligations on Israel, including to ensure that the Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in Gaza, has access to the essentials of life and to agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population, including through the United Nations and its entities, particularly the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

The Court also reaffirmed Israel’s obligation to respect the prohibition on the use of starvation as a method of war and the prohibition on mass forcible transfers and deportation. In this regard, the Court reconfirmed that international human rights law applies, alongside international humanitarian law, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and that Israel is obligated to respect the human rights of the population under its occupation, emphasizing the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, as well as the rights to life; to be free from torture or ill-treatment; to liberty and security; to freedom of movement; to protection of the family; to an adequate standard of living; to health; to education; and to be free from discrimination.

We urge the international community, including the Security Council and the General Assembly, to uphold the rule of law with all the peaceful tools at its disposal and to act now to implement the relevant resolutions, including with regard to the New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. There must be immediate action to stop Israel’s degradation of Palestinian life and to help our people in Gaza to heal and recover; to begin reconstruction and revival of hope and life; to sustain and extend the ceasefire to the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory; and to ensure an end to this genocide and the start of a genuine path for justice, freedom and peace for the Palestinian people and a just and lasting solution to this prolonged, tragic conflict.

The present letter is in follow-up to our 877 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 2025 (A/ES-10/1047-S/2025/631), 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 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