2/10/2025
The undersigned Palestinian civic organizations and collectives underline the utmost urgency for a permanent ceasefire and for the ongoing genocide to stop. However, we cannot trust the proposed 20-point plan, designed by the United States and Israel to actually put an end to the suffering and ensure the protection and unconditional provision of humanitarian aid, and put an end to the siege on our people.
After enduring a two-year long genocide, Palestinians are now being forced into a position of having to negotiate an end to their slaughter and surrender their fundamental inalienable right to self-determination. Palestinians are the first victims of a genocide in modern history required to negotiate an end to the international crimes perpetrated against them while forcibly denied their fundamental right to self-determination. The proposal, written in the absence of any Palestinian experts, is in principle, substance and process, a mere continuation of Israel’s settler colonial apartheid policies and practices and unlawful occupation, albeit with different actors.
Israel and the US cannot be trusted as fair brokers for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the respect of fundamental Palestinian rights including the right of return and the right to life. Using forced starvation, threats to life, and ultimatums during its brutal genocidal assaults as pressure to accept a deal that violates international law is a tactic to blame failures on Palestinians rather than on the occupier and perpetrator of international crimes. Far from being a source of stability in the region, the United States has actively caused division, fuelled violence, and stoked sectarian tendencies that endanger local populations and international peace, all in line with their expansionist settler colonial interests.
The plan does not include any accountability measures on Israel for its settler colonial apartheid regime, unlawful occupation, and genocide. The deliberate vagueness of the plan, its absence of timelines, binding guarantees, or conditions on Israel for a full withdrawal and a permanent stop to the killing, serves as a strategy to gain time. This enables Israel to further entrench its settler colonial apartheid regime over the Palestinian people on both sides of the Green Line, while dragging out the process to shape it in line with its genocidal and colonial objectives. In addition, the conditions enshrined in the plan open the door for Israel to resume its genocide even after Palestinians have met the initial requirements. Time and time again, Israel has violated previous agreements, rejected ceasefire proposals, and collapsed the latest ceasefire arrangement while openly declaring its intention to “finish the job.”
The proposal further deflects responsibility from third states, relieving them of their clear obligations to hold Israel accountable and to refrain from aiding and abetting its expansionist settler colonial apartheid regime and unlawful occupation. States must therefore adhere to their legal responsibilities to end the genocide through sanctions and isolation of the colonial Israeli regime, while providing immediate support for a UNGA-mandated multilateral force to protect Palestinians. States must work collectively to dismantle the Israeli settler colonial apartheid regime on both sides of the Green Line as the root cause underpinning the genocide, implement the recommendations of the International Court of Justice in the 2024 Palestine Advisory Opinion on ending the occupation with full withdrawal of the Occupying Power, end the siege on Gaza, and the annexation of the West Bank including Jerusalem, and ensure the full exercise of the collective right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and return of Palestinian refugees and exiles in the diaspora.
We therefore stress the need for states to stop engaging with Israel and the US Trump administration and use all the leverage at your disposal by taking the concrete measures mentioned below to end the ongoing genocide and injustices.
Use diplomatic, economic and financial measures
- Imposing a three-way military embargo on Israel, covering all arms, dual-use technology, surveillance equipment, jet fuel, training, joint exercises, and military bases. No selling, buying, transferring by air, sea, or land, and dual-use items;
- Enforcing diplomatic sanctions, by expelling Israeli ambassadors, suspending official visits, and cooperation with Israeli authorities;
- Imposing targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, on individuals and institutions complicit in Israel’s international crimes;
- End all economic aid and cooperation agreements that sustain Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime and unlawful occupation, terminating free trade agreements;
- Impose a three-way energy embargo by halting all imports/exports of oil, gas, coal and electricity; divesting from extraction projects; and terminating all agreements involving transit, pipelines, and infrastructure involving the occupied Palestinian territory and its Exclusive Economic Zone;
- Prohibit coastal passage and docking of vessels in your territorial waters carrying weapons, military and dual use equipment, fuel, or goods supporting Israel’s gravely illegal acts; prohibit vessels flying their flag from carrying such military and dual-use materiel;
- Terminate all bilateral and multilateral Free Trade and Cooperation Agreements, especially the EU-Israel Association Agreement under Article 2 violation, and all EU-funded cooperation programs, including academic, cultural and sports programs, and the Mercosur-Israel Free Trade Agreement;
- Adopt national legislation preventing businesses within your jurisdiction from operating, trading, investing, or maintaining Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime and illegal occupation, including its settlement enterprise;
- Dismantle Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime on both sides of the Green Line, and to assist this process establish the UN Special Committee on Apartheid, and UN Centre Against Apartheid.
- Demand that the UNGA suspend Israel’s membership for violating its membership conditions, including non-compliance with Resolution 194. This is compounded by its systematic violations and attacks on UN principles and institutions.
Use of Accountability Mechanisms
- Exercise universal jurisdiction to arrest and prosecute all Israeli perpetrators of international crimes, in particular the political and military leaders involved in planning and carrying out international crimes against the Palestinian people;
- Enforce ICC arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Minister of Defence Gallant by arresting and transferring them to The Hague if present within jurisdiction, including airspace.
Submit written interventions in support of the South Africa v Israel genocide case; - Expand the UN Database on Business and Human Rights to include corporations complicit in the genocide, along with companies and non-profits involved in maintaining the settler colonial apartheid regime on bot sides of the Green Line.
- Establish an International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Palestine (IIIM) for international accountability and to preserve evidence.
Supporting efforts to establish an international, multinational protection force in Palestine
- Consistent with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and pursuant to the Uniting for Peace mechanism, with a mandate to protect Palestinians, stop ongoing violations of international law, including acts that amount to genocide, to enable the dismantling of the settler colonial apartheid regime on both sides of the Green Line.
Ground plans for the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people
- The right to self-determination, a peremptory norm under international law, for all 15 million Palestinians. This right does not begin or end with statehood but includes the collective will of the people to freely determine their political status and pursue economic, social, and cultural development, including sovereignty over land and resources.
- The right of return for all Palestinians, for exiled deportees, and refugees displaced during the Nakba (1948), Naksa (1967), and subsequent waves of forced displacement.
- The right to full reparation, including restitution, compensation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition.
Supporting Palestinian efforts in rebuilding a unified, democratic Palestinian leadership. Representing the Palestinian people in Palestine and in exile by
- Ending the delegitimization of Palestinian political factions, and promoting national reconciliation without imposed conditions.
- Pressuring Israel to release all Palestinian political prisoners, and end arbitrary detention and torture.
Palestinian civil movement
- The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD)
- Al-Haq
- Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership & Rights Activation- PYALARA
- The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH)
- Filastiniyat
- Beitna
- Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC)
- Rihannah society