{"id":307952,"date":"2025-05-08T16:16:52","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T20:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/unispal\/?post_type=document&p=307952"},"modified":"2025-05-29T16:17:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T20:17:05","slug":"war-on-palestinian-children-must-end-now-letter-from-the-state-of-palestine-a-es-10-1033-s-2025-297","status":"publish","type":"document","link":"https:\/\/www.un.org\/unispal\/document\/war-on-palestinian-children-must-end-now-letter-from-the-state-of-palestine-a-es-10-1033-s-2025-297\/","title":{"rendered":"War on Palestinian children must end now – Letter from the State of Palestine (A\/ES-10\/1033-S\/2025\/297)"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

08 May 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
General Assembly<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/td>\nSecurity Council<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Tenth emergency special session<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/td>\nEightieth year<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Agenda item 5<\/p>\n

Illegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory<\/strong><\/p>\n

Identical letters dated 8 May 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<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Palestinian children are being butchered and burned.<\/p>\n

Palestinian children are being massacred.<\/p>\n

Palestinian children are being starved, dehydrated, collectively punished, ravaged by disease, and denied food, water, medical care, shelter and all essentials of life.<\/p>\n

Palestinian children are being tormented and traumatized, and witnessing and enduring horrifying atrocities, devastation and destruction, and the erasure of their families, their communities and their lives.<\/p>\n

Palestinian children are being chased from one end of Gaza to the other, crammed into 30 per cent of the territory, and chased from their homes and humanitarian shelters, from their villages and schools, and from the face of the Earth, by a terrorist occupying army and its terrorist settler militias.<\/p>\n

No sooner had I sent my last letter to you, three days ago, on 5 May, than Israel, the occupying Power, ramped up its attacks across Gaza\u2019s cities and refugee camps, killing at least 100 Palestinians in the span of 24 hours, and wounding hundreds of others; again, the majority of the victims were children and women.<\/p>\n

After having survived the torture and horrors of 19 months of Israel\u2019s genocidal war on our people, these 100 women, men, children, young people and elders were summarily murdered by the Israeli occupying forces and hundreds more were left injured and maimed, adding to the ever-growing list of casualties of Israel\u2019s onslaught, now conservatively estimated to have surpassed 170,000 Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Again, entire families have been wiped out by Israeli strikes targeting the Palestinian civilian population, a population marked for annihilation by Israel\u2019s genocidal leaders, who are wilfully and wantonly commanding the perpetration of such savagery, leaving nowhere safe and no means of survival for them.<\/p>\n

These genocidal aims are reconfirmed on a daily basis in Israeli officials\u2019 menacing vows, asserted openly and repeatedly, despite the demands by the international community for a halt to the onslaught and the restoration of a ceasefire, and despite the provisional measures orders of the International Court of Justice.<\/p>\n

Yet again, such a threat was made by far-right Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who, on 6 May, after approval of plans for the \u201cconquest of the Gaza Strip\u201d, declared, inter alia, that \u201cGaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to \u2026 the south \u2026 and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries\u201d. An Israeli official \u2013 a member of the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity \u2013 blatantly declares Israel\u2019s intent to proceed with the destruction of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, whether by death, starvation or ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker T\u00fcrk, has warned that Israel\u2019s plans to forcibly transfer Gaza\u2019s population to the south and \u201cto deport Palestinians outside of Gaza further aggravate concerns that Israel\u2019s actions are aimed at inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group\u201d.<\/p>\n

Still, the international community fails to act on binding obligations, not least obligations to prevent genocide from being committed or incited, to prevent starvation as a weapon of war, and to prevent the forced transfer of civilians. International law, humanitarian responsibilities, moral duties and the very foundations of our common humanity are being torn asunder by the failure to act to halt Israel\u2019s impunity.<\/p>\n

So, we are left with the human catastrophe of the bodies of Palestinian children, women and men shredded in broad daylight by all means of lethal weaponry, and of an entire people being starved and emaciated, with food and humanitarian aid being weaponized in the most sinister of ways, a humanitarian catastrophe without precedent in this century, and blatant threats and official plans aimed at the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their homeland, not only from Gaza, but from the rest of Occupied Palestine.<\/p>\n

In this regard, repeat offender Minister Smotrich recently boasted about plans to divide the West Bank by colonizing the so-called \u201cE1 area\u201d, declaring schemes to colonize the West Bank, including East Jerusalem with \u201ca million residents\u201d (i.e.\u00a0settlers) and that \u201cthis is how you kill the Palestinian state de facto\u201d.<\/p>\n

Such illegal plans are directly matched by Israel\u2019s brutality and destruction on the ground, where it is accelerating its campaign to forcibly dispossess and massively displace Palestinian civilians. In the northern West Bank, the areas of Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarem continue to be particularly targeted, as are the refugee camps throughout the West Bank. Simultaneously, terrorist settler militias continue their theft, destruction and attacks on Palestinian civilians with the collusion and support of the Israeli occupying forces and the Israeli government.<\/p>\n

The occupying Power also persists with its assaults on Palestinian life in occupied East Jerusalem and attempts to entrench its annexation and illegitimate sovereignty claims. Today, the Israeli occupying forces raided three United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools in the Shu\u2019fat refugee camp, forcing more than 550 refugee girls and boys who were in the classrooms to leave their schools, violating their right to education and the inviolability of United Nations premises. Now, UNRWA has been forced to evacuate all students across the six schools it runs in East Jerusalem, leaving 800 children traumatized and deprived of education.<\/p>\n

We reiterate our call for action by the international community, including the Security Council, to stop all these Israeli crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and to stop the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.<\/p>\n

Collective action must be taken to pressure Israel to halt immediately and completely all of its violations of international law. Israel cannot remain the exception to every rule, running rogue as a State above the law. There must be accountability and no more complicity.<\/p>\n

We thus echo the warnings by 38 special rapporteurs and independent human rights experts who yesterday, 7 May, issued an urgent call to end the unfolding genocide, stressing, inter alia: \u201cEscalating atrocities in Gaza present an urgent moral crossroads and States must act now to end the violence or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza \u2013 an outcome with irreversible consequences for our shared humanity and multilateral order\u2026 The world is watching. Will Member States live up to their obligations and intervene to stop the slaughter, hunger, and disease, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity that are perpetrated daily in complete impunity?\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

We appeal now, once again and with the utmost urgency, for immediate political and humanitarian intervention to protect the Palestinian people and to save them from Israel\u2019s plans for their annihilation.<\/p>\n

We reiterate our call on the Security Council to act immediately to implement its resolutions, including resolution 2735 (2024)<\/a><\/em>, in full and without exception.<\/p>\n

We again urge the mediators of the ceasefire agreement \u2013 Egypt, Qatar and the United States of America \u2013 and all peace-loving countries to exert every effort to restore an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and ensure its permanence across the Occupied Palestinian Territory; to enable the immediate delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance by United Nations agencies, including UNRWA, and other international organizations, in accordance with international humanitarian law, to halt the starvation and slaughter of our people in Gaza, among them 1 million children; and to avert the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian civilian population from any part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

Stop this genocide. Safeguard the inalienable rights of the Palestinian to life and to self-determination. End this illegal, immoral, colonial and apartheid occupation.<\/p>\n

The present letter is in follow-up to our 866 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<\/a><\/em>) to 5 May 2025 (A\/ES-10\/32-S\/2025\/285<\/a><\/em>) 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(Signed<\/em>) Riyad Mansour<\/strong><\/p>\n

Minister<\/p>\n

Permanent Observer<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [1] Statement available at: www.ohchr.org\/en\/press-releases\/2025\/05\/end-unfolding-genocide-or-watch-it-end-life-gaza-un-experts-say-states-face<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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