It is with the greatest concern and urgency that we, the Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council (PHROC), address this letter to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Volker Türk, to demand an appropriate response to Israel’s manifestly unlawful actions across the occupied Palestinian territory, but especially in the northern West Bank and Gaza Strip.
On 18 March 2025, two weeks after Israel imposed a total blockade on the Gaza Strip, preventing 2.1 million people from receiving all life-saving supplies, including food, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, mobile homes and even tents that could provide some protection from the harsh weather, the Israeli military accelerated its genocidal violence in Gaza. After the 42-day “ceasefire”, Israel continued its genocidal acts of killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, and creating conditions of life unfit for human survival in Gaza, cutting off electricity and water, blocking the entry of lifesaving humanitarian aid. Israel continues to impose measures intended to prevent births having decimated Gaza’s entire healthcare system –– including all its sexual and reproductive health facilities –– resulting in a complete lack of reproductive services, in acts condemned by the UN Commission of Inquiry, as genocidal.
Israel’s return to heavy aerial bombardment on 18 March, which saw one of the largest single-day child death tolls in the last year, is now accompanied by an Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) ground incursion spreading from Rafah into the north of Gaza. The genocidal acts of killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm –– as witnessed by the 1,946 Palestinians killed since 18 March 2025 not including those still trapped under the rubble, and 2,762 Palestinians injured –– come in tandem. The indirect, and often hidden, victims of Israel’s targeting of critical infrastructure, such as the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in central Gaza, the only medical facility delivering cancer care in the Strip, which was hit by the IOF on 21 March, and the Nasser hospital attacked on 23 March are also unaccounted for in the already staggering number of Palestinians killed and seriously injured by Israel’s settler-colonial, genocidal regime. Since 23 March, 15 humanitarian workers who were dispatched to collect the injured in Gaza were targeted by Israeli forces, killed and “discarded in shallow graves”, including 8 from the Palestine Red Crescent Society, 6 from the Palestinian Civil Defense and one from the UN.
For the past 17 months, Israel has laid bare its genocidal intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza and resettle the territory. On 20 March 2025, the IOF re-entered the Netzarim Corridor and announced its plans to extend the “buffer” zone, in obvious preparation to maintain control over and eventually annex the Gaza Strip. On 26 March, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz informed the public, in a message directed at Palestinians in Gaza, that the IOF “will soon operate forcefully in other areas of the Gaza Strip, and you will be required to evacuate and lose more and more territory… [t]he plans are ready and approved.” On 2 April, Minister Katz ordered the expansion of military operations in Gaza to “increase pressure” on the “population in Gaza”.
This specific intent to eliminate and eventually destroy Palestinians across unlawfully occupied Palestine is also being witnessed in the West Bank. As the ceasefire of January 2025 came into effect in Gaza, Israel dramatically escalated its attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. On 21 January 2025, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 warned:
As the long awaited ceasefire in Gaza took place, Israel's death machinery escalated its firing in the West Bank, killing 10 people in Jenin today. If it is not forced to stop, Israel's genocide of Palestinians will not be confined to Gaza. Mark my words.
Just days after the agreement to end the onslaught on Gaza was reached, Israel forced over 40,000 Palestinians from their homes across the West Bank governorates of Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas –– with Israeli forces telling Palestinians they will never be allowed to return.
We note that the OHCHR, and the UN as the representative of the international community, has a continuing responsibility to the Palestinian people to ensure the realisation of their collective inalienable right to self-determination and to bring to an end the genocidal acts, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the continuing crime of aggression being committed by Israel.
PHROC stresses that words matter and the mischaracterisation of the attacks on Gaza has consequences. After one of the deadliest nights of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which killed well over 400 people and injured close to a thousand others, the OHCHR commented:
The hostages must be released immediately and unconditionally. All those arbitrarily detained must be released immediately and unconditionally. The war must end permanently.
PHROC stresses that this is not a “war”, or even a conflict between equal parties. This is a legally recognised situation of unlawful occupation, in which the Occupying Power has been found by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to be plausibly committing genocide, in territory it holds as an unlawfully present Occupying Power applying a settler colonial apartheid regime. Notably, the findings of the UN Human Rights Council mandated Commission of Inquiry in its most recent report in March, concludes that Israel is carrying out acts of genocide. More concerning is the fact that this brief statement on the general need to uphold international law, as if each party is committing commensurate violations, follows an OHCHR report adopting the same non-committal language throughout.
Published on 13 February 2025, and covering events between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, the report concluded that “Israeli forces and Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups” have committed war crimes and, if committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, further to a State or organizational policy or “an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, they may also have committed crimes against humanity or genocide. This circumspect conclusion, shrouded in evasive and vague language that omits mentioning a specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, almost leads to the implication that Hamas or other Palestinian armed groups are also potentially liable for genocide. While this is presumably not the intent of the OHCHR, it serves as a striking example of the overly cautious - and at this point inappropriate - language being employed by “the leading UN entity on human rights”. Such language only serves to feed into the false narrative perpetrated by Israel, its allies, and Western media of two equal warring parties, which serves as a crucial tool in detracting from the reality that Israel is rapidly advancing in its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel’s manifestly unlawful conduct in Gaza should not have been able to continue unabated for 17 months, and it can not be allowed to continue for even a month longer. The presence and future of Palestinians as a group hinges on the ability, and willingness, of the international community to intervene and put an end to this nightmare.
As the lead UN entity mandated to promote and protect human rights for all, PHROC calls on the OHCHR tot:
- Label Israel’s conduct appropriately as genocide, and highlight the ramifications and lasting consequences of its dehumanising settler-colonial, apartheid regime;
- Impose maximum pressure on governments to fulfill their human rights obligations to end the genocide;
- Call for full criminal accountability of Israeli perpetrators for the ongoing genocide in Gaza;
- Mobilise UN entities and Third States to commit to and implement a plan to end Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, and prevent further genocidal acts, including by ending the unlawful occupation, and annexation of Palestine with immediate effect.