As we speak today, Israeli authorities are escalating their assault on Gaza City, where the world’s foremost experts on food insecurity, the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC), in August declared a famine, caused by Israel’s mass starvation strategy. The rigorous Commission of Inquiry report underscores the growing consensus among human rights organizations and experts around the ongoing atrocities in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Israel’s actions in Gaza should have long ago triggered the “duty to prevent” under the Genocide Convention, but states have failed to act decisively. As we have passed the deadline the UN General Assembly set for Israel to comply with the landmark 2024 International Court of Justice opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, it is not only Israel which has failed to comply, but governments across the globe. The double standards of many leading world powers and their failure to act have effectively given Israel the green light to proceed with announced plans to demolish what remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and to further displace Palestinians.
Some states have recently recognized the State of Palestine, but the move risks being an empty gesture if states continue to allow trade with illegal settlements that make its existence impossible and fail to act as Palestinians face extermination and ethnic cleansing?
States should urgently act, including by imposing an arms embargo on Israel and targeted sanctions against Israeli officials responsible for ongoing grave abuses, suspending preferential trade agreements with Israel, condemning US sanctions against ICC officials, a UN rights expert and leading Palestinian human rights groups advocating for justice, and committing to defending the ICC and those working with it from coercive measures, execute its warrants and support its investigations. States should use the new update to the UN database of businesses facilitating Israeli settlements in the OPT to fulfill their duty to prevent businesses located in their countries from continuing to contribute to grave violations of Palestinian rights. States have all the tools they need—now is the time to act.
