Today is day five hundred eighty five of genocide. And every day, we witness unprecedented atrocities. Two days ago, we saw a baby in a red onesie, not yet one years old, have both of her tiny legs amputated. We witnessed a missile rip through a hospital to kill a renowned journalist receiving treatment and learned of the assassination of a 12 year old boy who witnessed the massacre of 15 paramedics and their burial in a mass grave. Israel has destroyed 92% of Gaza’s residential buildings, incapacitated its 36 hospitals, and prevented the entry of food and basic goods.
In doing so, it is not only killing Palestinians now but threatening the possibility of a Palestinian future. A campaign that seeks to obliterate the future of a people is a genocide. Yet, despite these chilling statistics and an ICJ decision indicating its plausibility, there remains controversy as to this basic fact. Why? The most pervasive talking point is that Israel is not targeting Palestinians as a people, but only targeting Hamas.
Putting aside significant issues in law and fact that militate against this point, let me just share with you some statistics. What we know so far is that two percent of Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, including over 20,000 children buried and disappeared. The names of those under the age of one fill the the first fourteen pages of a 649 page document. So far, 1,200 entire families have been erased forever from the civil registry. Three months into the war, the UN humanitarian chief described Gaza as uninhabitable.
And since then, the situation has only gotten worse. This certainly exceeds Hamas militants. According to Israel, these horrifying numbers are irrelevant because they are the result, they say, of deliberate human shielding by Hamas. Again, putting aside significant issues of law and fact, let me just share with you the tactics of the army itself. It has sniped children twice above the waist.
It has used quadcopters to spray and kill children who are sprawled and injured on the floor. It has destroyed the largest in vitro fertility clinic, including 4,000 embryos. It has executed patients with their hands zip tied and thrown into mass graves. They have sexually assaulted detainees captured without charge or trial, bombed safe routes where Palestinians were ordered to flee, bombed safe zones where Palestinians were ordered to shelter, tortured medical doctors to death, destroyed more than half of Gaza’s desalination plants, undermining access to clean water, leveled all four major universities, attacked factories, libraries, bakeries, heritage sites, 247 mosques, three churches, and bulldozed 16 cemeteries. As put by professor Shireen Sayali, any honest observer of this war understands that the target of Israeli force and US supplied weapons is the Palestinian civilian.
Hamas is the collateral damage. The purpose of this campaign is the destruction of a the Palestinian people for the sake of achieving long term Israeli security, what I term, Negba peace. A violent oxymoron that predicates Jewish Israeli safety on the elimination of Palestinians. In pursuit of its territorial ambitions to achieve unchecked Zionist settler sovereignty, Israel has removed Palestinians for seventy seven years and counting. It has imposed a permanent military occupation on the West Bank in Gaza for fifty eight years and counting, and it has besieged 2,300,000 Palestinians who are now possibly only 2,000,000 because of this past nineteen months, besiege them for seventeen years and counting.
What we have been witnessing for the past five hundred eighty five days is the cruelest and most violent episode of the ongoing NECPA. This did not start on October 7, nor was it a response to October 7 that provided a useful cover in order to accelerate this massive removal. On 10/12/2023, agricultural minister Abi Duchter told us plainly this is Nakba twenty twenty three, a campaign that is evidenced across Palestinian geographies, including in the Northern West Bank where some 40,000 Palestinians have been removed just this year. The Trump administration has adopted this goal in its current build bid to build a Gaza Riviera to remove Palestinians to the Sudan, Somalia, or Syria. And most recently, on 05/04/2025, the Israeli cabinet unanimously voted to reoccupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse its remaining inhabitants.
This is why the return of more than 300,000 Palestinians to their homes in North Gaza in early twenty twenty five was so incredible. It was the first time in nearly eight decades of ongoing Nakba that we witnessed the return of Palestinians in mass, a return that embodies the national aspirations of the Palestinian people. As chronicled by Ahmed Abortima who marched home, on that day, I walked as I had never walked before. About 15 kilometers nonstop, I entered Gaza City, a dream long cherished during the days of war now realized. Despite unprecedented cruelty, Palestinians refused to surrender and marched home by foot.
This is precisely why Palestinians are racialized as a cure security threat because they, we, refuse to disappear. The Nakba is ongoing, and so is Palestinian resistance to our elimination. There is sufficient law to end the genocide, to lift the blockade, to end the occupation, and to realize Palestinian self determination. Had international law ever been enough, however, Palestinian refugees would be growing their families and their gardens on their original lands rather than searching for the remains of flesh of their babies beneath the rubble. Remarkably, the time of genocide has also been a moment of significant judicial strides furthering Palestinian liberation.
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice determined that Israel’s campaign was plausible genocide. In May 2024, it issued an other provisional measure ordering the withdrawal from Rafah. That same month, the International Criminal Court finally issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant. In July 2024, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion determining that Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful, ordering it to withdraw its settlers and military from the territory and to provide reparations for the Palestinian people. Last month, the ICJ heard an argument on the legality of banning UNRWA, the UN refugee agency responsible for humanitarian relief and now banned amid a starvation campaign that has killed 57 children in two months.
This is not a legal controversy. It is a political one. The United States, among other states, has wrung its hands behind judicial rulings, but this is selective deference to the court. In its last days of office, the Biden administration recognized there’s a genocide of the Masalid ethnic tribe in Darfur by the rapid support forces. When asked whether they can use the same standards to make that decision to adjudicate Israel’s campaign in Gaza, The US Ambassador At Large For Global Criminal Justice said, quote, it will ultimately be for the ICJ judges to decide with zero irony that they did not have to submit their evidence on The Sudan before the ICJ.
This is not a legal controversy. This is a political one. The selective deference to the ICJ on the question of genocide of Palestinians is an attempt to deflect responsibility, and the ongoing counterrevolution against activists globally is an attempt to revise a history of the present. Since 2020, an emerging consensus among less legacy human rights organizations and the world court have defined Israel as an apartheid regime. Rather than boycott, divest from, and sanction apartheid Israel, the global community has attempted to normalize it.
Five years later, we see the danger of allowing that exception. Apartheid and genocide are on the same continuum. The three of the specific acts conducted to maintain apartheid are identical to the acts committed to commit genocide. In the former, for apartheid, they are done for the purpose of dominate of domination. In the latter, they are done with the intent to destroy.
Genocide is the logical outcome of any project to conquer and settle the land upon which other people live unless it is checked. Many of you here, many of you have either survived colonialism or are the ancestors of those who have survived colonialism, and you are painfully aware of its legacies. That’s why in 1974, this body firmly resolved that Palestinians are a juridical people. Palestinians exist and deserve to exist by relegating Palestine to a bilateral bilateral political issue beyond the reach of international norms, you have steadily normalized occupation. By failing to apply sanctions and engage in boycott, many of you have normalized apartheid.
And now, by failing to act, you are at risk of normalizing genocide. But if you normalize genocide, you will have nothing left. If it is permissible to deny a people exist, to cage them, to subject them to systematic warfare, then to use AI technology to bomb them at unprecedented rates in their homes, to burn them alive in tents, to experiment on them with suicide drones, to deny them medical care, to allow premature babies to rot in NICU units, and mamas be denied anesthetic to have c sections, to starve them while their food decays in miles of eight trucks, all without consequence, and worse, while insisting that their lives are secondary, if not altogether insignificant relative to Zionist settler sovereignty, then I promise you that no one is safe. As put by Colombian president Gustavo Pietro, Gaza is a rehearsal for the rest of the world. Israeli finance minister, Basilil Smotrich, recently said that the victory in the war would mean the full destruction of Gaza and the displacement of its residents.
He has also boasted that Israelis, quote, are finally going to conquer the Gaza Strip. We are no longer afraid of the word occupation. Smotrich’s audacity is our failure. You must make it impossible for Smotrich and anyone else to boast of conquest through genocide in the twenty first century. Make those who speak it have to say it in hushed whispers, enclosed rooms rather than boast about that conquest.
But let us speak honestly. Most of you fear US retribution. The genocide in Gaza is one of the major atrocities of our time, and most people in the world are against it. Our inability to stop it reflects an inten international system where the equality of nation states remains an aspirational principle. It might be good for us to remember, The United States is an empire, but The United States is not the world.
In this precise moment, US Lawmakers welcomed the international war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu into the White House. US lawmakers and universities welcome minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gur, who was disqualified for military service because of his affiliation with the Cahan Movement declared a terrorist organization by The US and Israel. Can you imagine being so extreme that you cannot serve in the Israeli army? The same army that sprays five and a half year old girls with 335 bullets and executes 15 paramedics and buries them along with their ambulances in a mass grave? The Israeli army wouldn’t have Ben Gurir, but US Lawmakers and several US universities embraced him just as they colluded to kidnap, disappear, and deport students.
Do not look west for moral or political leadership. The United States has long absconded on that position. Do not let The United States and Israel upend the global system. In its defense of Israel, The United States threatens the entire legal structure established since since the second World War. In just nineteen months, the US has vetoed five ceasefire resolutions to end this genocide despite the extraordinary invocation of article 99 by the UN secretary general and two invocations of uniting for peace resolutions.
Both the Biden and Trump administration have denigrated the ICJ. US national sec security spokesman John Kirby described the ICJ case on genocide con on the genocide convention as, quote, meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis, in fact, whatsoever. Our world court is being denigrated. The primary judicial organ of this body is being denigrated by those who claim global leadership. The US is not even a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, but the Trump administration has passed an executive order to place sanctions on the prosecutor and anyone who cooperates with the court.
In October 2024, a hundred and seven members of congress threatened to cease financial support to the uni UN if it unseated Israel, literally threatening its budget for doing your job. What is the purpose of the UN if it cannot stop a genocide and prevent the calculated starvation of 2,000,000 people? The international community has failed many times before and at great cost. One of the most significant times was in 1936 when the League of Nations allowed Mussolini’s fascist Italy to invade Ethiopia, an independent member state of the league. Then the league imposed cosmetic sanctions rather than an oil embargo to stop the war.
It tolerated Israel’s Italy’s use, excuse me, of chemical weapons and described Ethiopia’s People’s War as human shielding. The consequence of racist imperialism was ultimately the dissolution of the League of Nations. The UN was born of this failure. It was born of the commitment to not let atrocities of genocide from Namibia to the Armenian genocide to the holocaust happen again. It is that commitment that is at stake today.
If you do not stand up and speak out, this very system will be a casualty of The US Israel genocidal war on Palestine and the Palestinian people. Today, we do not need the United Nations to be a powerful symbol of international cooperation. We need your collective action to simply be powerful. In this moment, we have many choices. We can acknowledge Israel’s campaign as genocide and impose an arms embargo, block the ports, sever diplomatic ties, sever all civilian and military trade, impose cultural and academic boycotts, and unseat Israel for its obstinate transgressions.
If genocide is too much, you can confront this atrocity as a war, specifically, a colonial war against a racist regime and alien occupation regulated with the additional protocols and customary laws of war that recognize the captives as POWs, ensure them humane treatment, recognize Palestinian militants as combatants, permit third party intervention. We can use the law to protect hospitals and schools and shelters, to protect the journalists and doctors and aid workers, to forcibly open the humanitarian corridors and abide by the ICC arrest warrants to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant upon arrival. If war is too much, you can confront this atrocity as a humanitarian tragedy, and you can send in a peacekeeping mission to protect Palestinians who have been denied the right to self defense for nearly eight decades. And if humanitarian tragedy is too much, you can find a way to have mercy on the Palestinian children, the ones who have been pulled from the rubble with two limbs and no family and find themselves in a cage without food or water. Do not sit in the seat of power and do nothing.
The United States is an empire, but The United States is not the world. You are the world. Each and every one of you has the capacity to halt the charade, to fulfill the minimal mandate of protecting a people’s right to exist. Individually, you are each someone’s ancestor and you will be an ancestor to someone. Our time on this earth is ephemeral and I implore you to give it meaning.
As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish reminds us, we are not the most chosen people in the world, but no one is more chosen than us. You cannot abandon Palestine without betraying your legacy, your progeny, and yourself. May we transform this world into a place worthy of our children. May you be protected. May you be strong.
May we be victorious. Free Palestine, and may Palestine free us all. Thank you.
Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Addresses the UN in Commemoration of the 77th Anniversary of the Nakba, May 2025.