Unprecedented humanitarian crisis and war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli Occupation – Letter from the State of Palestine (A/ES-10/1029-S/2025/210)

04 April 2025

                     Identical letters dated 4 April 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 apocalyptic devastation in Gaza and the nightmare in the West Bank being meted out by Israel, the occupying Power, on the Palestinian people defy description and have broken every tenet of international law and of humanity itself.

As the world looks on, Israeli occupying forces continue to slaughter Palestinian children, women and men and to collectively punish the entire population at the behest of Israeli officials who openly declare their plans to ethnically cleanse our people by all means and to colonize and annex our land.

Israeli officials, including the Prime Minister and Defense Minister, continue to incite and boast of these criminal plans, shamelessly justifying the murder of civilians; vowing in recent days to “seize large areas of territory” and “divide up the Gaza Strip”, to pursue so-called “voluntary migration” of Palestinians, and that “there will never be a Palestinian State”; and threatening our people in the West Bank to “turn you into Gaza”.

To this end, every single day, a massacre of innocents is perpetrated. Every single day, atrocities are committed. Every single day, families are being terrorized and driven from their homes, chased by a ruthless occupier whose genocidal intent is beyond question.

In the week since my previous letter, hundreds more Palestinian civilians have been killed and wounded by the Israeli occupying forces in aerial bombings and ground attacks directly targeting civilian areas and structures.

28 March: 12 Palestinians killed in an Israeli bombing in Gaza City.

29 March: 6 Palestinians from a single family killed – father, mother and children – in the Israeli bombing of their home in Khan Yunus as they returned to gather food.

30 March: 19 Palestinians killed in Israeli bombings in Khan Yunus on the first day of Eid al-Fitr.

31 March: 9 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza City.

1 April: 5 Palestinians – a journalist, his wife and three children – killed in an Israeli strike in Khan Yunus.

2 April: 15 Palestinians killed in an Israeli bombardment in Khan Yunus; 22 Palestinians, 16 of whom were children, women and elderly persons, killed in an Israeli strike on a health clinic of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) that was sheltering displaced families in the Jabaliya refugee camp, some burned alive.

3 April: 15 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on residential buildings in Gaza City; 33 Palestinians killed, including 18 children, in the Israeli bombing of schools-turned-shelters in Gaza City.

4 April: 35 Palestinians killed in Israeli bombardments across Gaza City.

At least 350 children, including babies, have been murdered by Israel since it broke the ceasefire on 18 March, comprising the majority of the mass casualties. This includes babies, toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, all killed in calculated strikes on tents, homes and schools and health clinics sheltering the displaced. Alongside women, elderly persons and other civilians, these innocent children have been left without protection absent any international action to stop this genocide by Israel against the Palestinian people.

The total number of casualties in this same period has risen to 1,249 Palestinians killed and more than 3,000 wounded. More victims remain unaccounted for, added to the thousands of lost souls still unrecovered.

By now, the world has also heard the gruesome details of Israel’s massacre of 15 humanitarian workers – 8 medics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society, 6 rescue workers from the Palestinian Civil Defence and 1 United Nations staff member – who were killed on 23 March while on a mission to rescue the victims of an Israeli military attack in the city of Rafah. Evidence, including dispatch recordings, points to the killing of the first ambulance crew, followed by the targeting and killing of the medics and rescue workers who tried to rescue their colleagues. One of the victims of this massacre, a Palestine Red Crescent Society medic, remains missing.

Not only did the Israeli occupying forces summarily execute civilians who were trying to save lives, they also buried the bodies of the humanitarians in a mass grave. Some were found mutilated, some with bullet wounds to the head and chest, some with their hands and legs bound, and all in their uniforms. They were found on 31 March, covered under the sand along with their crushed ambulances, fire truck and United Nations vehicle, eight days after they went missing, a clear attempt by the occupying Power to hide this heinous crime.

This has been the single most deadly attack on Red Cross Red Crescent workers in the world since 2017. After having killed 377 humanitarian workers in 2024, the majority of them UNRWA staff members, making 2024 the deadliest year on record for aid workers, Israel is on a path to set another shocking record as it continues targeting them, already killing humanitarians in Gaza in the first three months of 2025, the majority of them local aid workers, that is, Palestinian nationals. The devastating toll now stands at 409 aid workers killed since Israel began this aggression on Gaza in October 2023, the most ever killed in any conflict.

We echo the calls for an independent international investigation to establish all the facts and to punish the perpetrators of this horrific crime. Similarly, we continue to call for immediate, comprehensive, independent international investigations of all the other crimes committed by Israel against our people to ensure accountability and justice for the countless victims of its barbaric campaign of mass killing, mass maiming, mass collective punishment, mass starvation, mass destruction and mass displacement.

We again demand immediate action to bring a halt to this genocide once and for all. Israeli military and settler attacks on our defenceless civilian population must be stopped in Gaza and in the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Israel’s vicious siege on Gaza – by which it has blocked all humanitarian access, allowing no food, water, medicine, fuel or any other humanitarian supplies to enter Gaza for over a month – must be lifted. The ethnic cleansing of our people must be stopped now. The international community’s failure to act, and the Security Council’s paralysis in particular, is clearly interpreted by Israel as an open licence for impunity.

In the past two weeks alone, this sense of unstoppable impunity has allowed Israel to forcibly uproot yet again more than 280,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Escalating its violent tactics and issuing sweeping evacuation orders, Israel has forcibly displaced 100,000 of them from Rafah, including children, women, elderly persons, disabled persons and wounded and sick persons, in just the past few days since my previous letter to you, with 65 per cent of Gaza under evacuation orders or prohibited to civilians as military zones.

This unchecked impunity has also allowed Israel to continue wielding hunger as a weapon of war. After more than a month of complete blockade, food supplies, including flour, are rapidly diminishing, leading to the closure of most of the bakeries supported by the World Food Programme. Malnutrition, starvation and dehydration are now once again stalking more than 2 million people in Gaza as the world looks on.

As recently stated by the head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Jonathan Whittall, the entire civilian population in Gaza is being “trapped, bombed and starved” and “people’s survival is dependent on an aid system that itself is under attack”.

This is not a by-product of war; this is systematic and deliberate Israeli policy. In fact, the previous week, Israel’s Supreme Court shamefully ruled in favour of the starvation of Gaza, with one justice going so far as to describe the war against “Amalek” as “obligatory”, proving yet again that it is not just a handful of rogue politicians in Israel who are indeed leading the charge in dehumanizing and assaulting Palestinian life and existence, but that all Israeli state institutions are actually involved in the perpetration of this genocide.

As in Gaza, Israel also continues to terrorize the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, including through constant dangerous incitement at the Haram al-Sharif, most recently by the so-called Israeli National Security Minister, who appears intent on provoking a religious war.

Not a day passes that the Israeli occupying forces and settler militias do not violently raid villages, towns and refugee camps, which have been targeted in particular. Following the same pattern of mass destruction and mass displacement caused by the Israeli occupying forces to the refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur al-Shams, Israel has begun to target the refugee camps in the Bethlehem area, with the Israeli occupying forces, accompanied by armoured bulldozers and drones, marking homes for demolition in the Dheisheh, Aida and Azza refugee camps, sealing off camp entrances and causing fear and panic among the camp residents, who have been refugees since 1948.

At the same time as it pursues this blatant ethnic cleansing campaign, Israel persists with measures to destroy the contiguity of the West Bank as part and parcel of its long-running attempts to destroy the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the State of Palestine and thwart the two-State solution. This includes rampant settlement construction, with the Israeli non-governmental organization Peace Now reporting that Israel has advanced at least 14,335 settlement units in less than three months, approving several hundred units every week under the fog of the war that it is waging in Gaza.

On 29 March, the Israeli government undertook plans to construct a so-called “Sovereignty Road” that will cut through the heart of the West Bank in the E-1 area and enable Israel to close off this vast area of land to Palestinians by diverting Palestinian movement to a separate road, another apartheid road. These plans also aim to facilitate its attempts to annex the “Ma’ale Adumim” area and proceed with its construction in the E-1 area, from which hundreds of Bedouin families have already been forcibly transferred and where hundreds more continue to be targeted.

Across Occupied Palestine and over decades, Israel’s objectives have been patently clear: Palestinian land without Palestinians. Its tactics – colonial, depraved, criminal – aim to create maximum misery, fear and despair to force the Palestinian people from their land, and include actions to convey that the only alternative to death is displacement from their homeland, as we are witnessing in Gaza with increasing brutality and inhumanity every day.

This grave injustice and all of these war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide must be stopped. Allowing Israeli war criminals to continue to get away with such crimes will only breed more impunity by Israel, which has not only systematically breached all provisions of international law, including humanitarian and human rights law, but has shredded them, and clearly aims at their destruction, to the detriment of the Palestinian people, the Israeli people and the international community as a whole. It must be stopped now.

Where the Security Council continues to fail its Charter duties, including in the implementation of its own resolutions, including, inter alia, resolution 2735 (2024) on the ceasefire in Gaza and resolution 2730 (2024) on the protection of United Nations and humanitarian personnel, States must act individually and collectively to fulfil their obligations under international law, to save human lives and to salvage the prospects for a just solution based on international law and the two-State solution.

The international community must refute attempts to normalize, support or justify such savagery or to deflect responsibility. It must reject Israel’s dehumanization of the Palestinian people and bring an end to this illegal, barbaric occupation. It must act now to regain its footing and restore its credibility by not only lamenting and condemning such illegal actions, but by backing the demands for a ceasefire and the cessation of violations with concrete actions to protect civilians and to impose consequences in the face of such criminality and the unfathomable human suffering it is causing. Only such action can bring pressure to bear to halt these crimes, deter future crimes, bring justice for the countless victims and make peace possible.

The present letter is in follow-up to our 862 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 28 March 2025 (A/ES-10/1028-S/2025/193), 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