News

UN admits Israeli-induced Gaza famine: Let’s build up to a Weekend of Global Disruption of complicity in Israel’s genocide, 18 – 21 September.

A statement from the BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest Palestinian civil society coalition leading the global BDS movement, to the President of the Eleventh Conference of States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty, Ambassador Carlos Foradori, and Representatives of State Parties.

Pressure State representatives to fulfil their legal and moral obligations as explicitly detailed in the Treaty.

In a landmark ruling, a Brussels Court today ordered the government of the Flemish region in Belgium to block a specific container carrying dual-use items to Israel and also to halt all further transit of military material to Israel for its ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.

“An unfortunate tendency to crash”

Palestinian civil society has called for a military embargo against apartheid Israel since the founding of the BDS movement, and more explicitly since 2011. Ending military ties with Israel is not only a moral obligation. A comprehensive military embargo against a State guilty of illegal military occupation, apartheid and “plausible genocide” is not a matter of discretion but a legal obligation under international law. Failing to impose it puts multilateralism and the rule of international law in danger, at a critical time when the far-right is rising in the West and just with the fanatic US administration coming to power, exacerbating the damage caused to the credibility of international law by the current administration’s full partnership in Israel’s genocide.

Israel is carrying out large scale military aggression in the illegally occupied West Bank. This comes just days after a shaky Gaza ceasefire agreement that Israel’s far-right government was finally forced to accept, according to Israeli media reports, following its failure to achieve its main objectives from its ongoing genocide.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society leading the global BDS movement, calls for immediate pressure on all States to support the updated resolution tabled at the UN General Assembly calling for sanctions on Israel. The resolution is aimed at enacting the July 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its violation of the prohibition of apartheid under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). A vote is expected in a few days.

The Maersk Denver is part of the Maersk fleet that is implicated in shipping US military supplies to Israel and is therefore reasonably suspected* of carrying illegal military cargo destined to Israel. This is in violation of a UNHRC resolution, a UNGA resolution, and statements by dozens of UN human rights experts, all calling for a military embargo on Israel due to its illegal occupation and its commission of a plausible genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, as the ICJ determined earlier this year.

In September, the UN General Assembly passed a historic resolution, calling for states and the UN to sanction Israel. This resolution affirmed that the July 2024 ruling by the ICJ triggers the legal obligation of all states to end complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime. 124 states across the globe committed to take the first steps to impose sanctions. The time to make this a reality is now!