We are horrified and outraged by the incessant bloodshed and the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, Rafah, and the West Bank carried out by the Israeli settler colonial state and the larger western imperial project.
Genocidal and ecocidal acts are being proudly committed and documented widely by Israeli subjects. We have witnessed pleas and calls for rescue and ceasefire by Palestinians from all generations and across borders. The ICJ’s landmark ruling and the UNSC resolution 2728 (2024) are legally binding and should be made effective immediately. Compliance and firm action by the global community can ensure the upholding of justice, leaving no room for doubt of the urgency of the situation.
In the besieged Gaza, the death toll is rising every day and has surpassed 34,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were women or children. Men have been subjected to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, public humiliation and torture by the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. According to UN experts Palestinian women and girls have repeatedly been denied access to essential health services (including sexual and reproductive health) and have reportedly been arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family members, including their children, and subjected to sexual harassment, rape, and assault in prisons and detentions by Israeli soldiers.
The overwhelming majority of the population of Gaza have been forcibly displaced and are subjected to deliberate starvation as an unlawful weapon of war, as Israel had also occupied water supply, and been in control of all of Gaza’s resources for decades including electricity and food import, production,and harvesting.
Israeli settler colonial state attacks on Gaza have doubled the rates of permanent disability, conflicting with Israel’s pretense of championing disability rights at the United Nations. More than seventy percent of the infrastructure has been destroyed along with the majority of hospitals in Gaza with sewage flooding to one of the last standing hospitals, making Palestinians prone to infectious diseases. Palestinians’ connection to the outside world has been interrupted because of frequent and prolonged internet blackouts imposed by the apartheid Israel settler state. Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah is a heinous cold blooded massacre and a grave violation of international law and humanity as more than 1.5 million people, most of whom were displaced from other areas of Gaza, are sheltering in Rafah as their last resort, where food and other essential supplies are scarce amid severe Israeli restrictions. Rafah is “the last line of Palestinian existence in Gaza, amidst the relentless anguish faced by the people trapped therein” according to the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine.
The glaring complicity of predominantly global north governments particularly the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Australia and others in arming, aiding and abetting, enforcing, and justifying the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians confirms that these states are using the multilateral system for their own interests. These states have been proud of their human rights records and their Feminist Foreign and development policies, while deliberately undermining international peace, security and justice by unconditionally supporting the Israeli colonial settler project. Furthermore, repeated global efforts to stop the genocide have been blocked in the UN by the same Westeren countries that are enriching themselves and carrying out their imperial project in Palestine through military expansion. This situation has evidenced that the current multilateral order is solely functioning to oppress countries of the Global South while ensuring impunity for the imperial project of Global North countries and guarding their best interests in the region.
The Women’s Major Group is a strong supporter of a multilateral order that works with the people and for the people. Therefore, our starting point is to call for the restoration of a multilateral system that responds to the principles of universality, ensuring dignity, freedom and liberty for all people, including the right to self-determination.
We reject the commodification and the weaponizing of feminism to justify genocide and occupation and we say: NOT IN OUR NAME!
We demand an end to the occupation, mass killing, apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure of Palestinians by the apartheid settler state that is Israel. We urge for long-term justice building that understands occupation as the root cause of the violence, gives the land back to those suffering from colonial impositions, and ensures the Palestinians’ sovereignty over their lives, land and resources with dignity and security. We stand for the right to self-determination for Palestinians, and we call on feminists and the international community to join us in:
1. Demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire to stop the mass killing of Palestinians.
2. Holding the Israeli settler colonial state accountable for all acts in violation of international criminal, human rights and humanitarian law, including genocide, apartheid, the bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, UN shelters, and the targeted killing of journalists and their families; forced evacuations, blocking essential and life-saving aid and supplies, use of white phosphorus in Gaza, the starvation of civilians and the decades-long illegal blockade on Gaza, as well as the settler violence in the West Bank and Ramallah. All governments and non-state actors committing, aiding, abetting, and funding war crimes and human rights violations must be held accountable.
3. Urging states and the international community to impose sanctions; arms, trade, sport, cultural embargoes; while strengthening the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) initiative against the apartheid settler Israeli project.
4. Demanding that the apartheid settler Israeli project complies with the ICJ ruling, initiate a process to end occupation, and provide reparations to the Palestinians.
5. Urging the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and all countries supplying military and/or financial support to immediately suspend all arms exports, to prevent the further loss of lives in Palestine and neighboring countries affected by Israeli aggression, such as Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
6. Adopting a disability-responsive approach in the humanitarian response that centers the voices and specific needs of people with disabilities, and those who have become disabled as a consequence of the ongoing genocide.
7. Reviving and supporting the work of the UNRWA and its ability to operate independently in Gaza and Palestine.
8. Allowing international humanitarian aid to come into Palestine and unblocking Palestinians’ access to water, food and fuel.
9. Demanding states such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, Canada, that are complicit in the genocide carried out in Palestine to refrain from using the term “Feminist Foreign Policy” or “Feminist Development Policy”. The feminist movement will not be used to legitimize nor pinkwash their genocidal complicity.
10. Suspending Israel’s membership and permanent representation in the United Nations after Israel has clearly violated the UN Charter and International laws, and continues to do so, with its representatives at the UN showing no respect for the entire UN process.
11. Upholding and safeguarding Palestinians’ right of return to their homes and land in Gaza, and for refugees displaced since 1948 to go back to Palestine and reclaim their stolen lands and homes.
12. Subjecting the United Kingdom to intergenerational reparations to Palestinians for sponsoring Israeli colonial settlement in Palestine.
13. Granting Palestine a full and permanent membership in the United Nations.
14. Demanding neutrality of judges in international courts and accountability from the security council and the Global North.
15. Demanding international criminal accountability (in the UN Security Council, the ICJ, and the ICC) by all those complicit in the ongoing genocide including Israeli officials and commanders, decision-makers and accomplices of all countries that have supported its settler state; especially decision makers in Germany for supporting Israel’s case in the ICJ, but also the US, France, and others, for arming the genocidal project.
16. Protecting the International Criminal Court and its Prosecutor and the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide’s professionalism, impartiality, and independence in the face of threats from Israel
17. Demanding from the UN, every member state, a strong stand in denouncing Israel for committing crimes against UN staff, humanitarian defenders and journalists with impunity and deliberation.
18. Calling for a reform of the UN Security Council to prevent the veto power from being used arbitrarily in the face of a genocide, and perversely used to favor imperial dynamics by powerful countries.
19. Calling for the protection of students’ freedom of protest and expression in solidarity with Palestine in the United States, the United Kingdom, Egypt, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria and around the world, and an immediate halt to unlawful arrests of students.
None of us is free without the freedom of Palestinian women and girls and the dismantling of all systems of oppression. We urge all states to act now to stop Israel from further creating irreparable harm and destruction and loss of innocent lives in Palestine.
