The international community has consistently failed to take effective measures to hold Israel accountable for its grave human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. It has failed to address the root causes of the ongoing dispossession, displacement, domination, and persecution of the Palestinian people, leading to deepening and worsening waves of genocidal colonial violence.
Israel’s genocidal onslaught, characterised by direct, blatant, and sustained criminal attacks targeting civilians including healthcare workers, journalists, and United Nations personnel and premises, including the World Health Organisation, and the repeated massacres on the tents and shelters of displaced Palestinians, who have been forced into tiny, unsafe areas of the Gaza Strip. Every day, there is a new “flour massacre”. Israel’s repeat attacks on starving displaced Palestinian civilians as they struggle to secure any supplies for their families and communities are being facilitated and sustained by Third States and international organisations, both through active complicity and the failure to act.
Since 2024 the International Court of Justice has issued three sets of Provisional Measures Orders requiring in particular, that Israel ensure the provision of humanitarian aid at scale in in “conformity with its obligations” under the Genocide Convention and “in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation”. The ICJ has also issued an Advisory Opinion affirming that Israel must withdraw from the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territory without delay. Arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court charging Israel’s leadership with war crimes and crimes against humanity for employing starvation as a method of warfare. Another Advisory Opinion has been requested of the ICJ, responding to Israel’s attacks on UN agencies providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, emphasising the Palestinian people’s inalienable right of self-determination.
Read the full position paper here.