Statement by the Palestinian Youth Movement, published on Mondoweiss, June 1, 2025
On October 17 2023, after 10 days of relentless aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Israel bombed al-Ahli hospital which was housing hundreds of Palestinians who had fled their demolished homes. The world watched in disbelief at the intentional targeting of a hospital sheltering the displaced, certain that Israel had crossed a red line. For a brief moment, it felt as though we had seen the worst of the genocide and surely, with the entire world as witnesses, it would stop.
One year and seven months have passed since then.
Since then, every single hospital in Gaza has been targeted, estimates of more than 100,000 Palestinians have been killed. Massacres are given titles: the Flour Massacre; the Al-Mawasi Khan Younis Massacres; the Rafah Tent Massacre; the Al-Fakhura School Airstrikes; and the list goes on.
One year and seven months ago, the entire world changed. International law, humanitarian organizations, structures that were put in place in response to some of the darkest chapters in history with the aim of preventing them from ever happening again all proved to be smoke screens; the rule-based order has been exposed as a farce. Amidst the quick deterioration of international law, people from every single continent rose with a fire that only sparks from deep conviction in a cause. Meanwhile, the forces who have led this genocidal campaign – Israel, US, and the Western nations – have effectively, undeniably revealed that their interests are aligned with war not welfare, profit not people, and capital not communities.
Many have succumbed to demoralization and defeatism, murmurs that, after a year and a half of mobilizations, encampments, arrests, disruptions, nothing has changed. In reality, everything has changed. Since October 2023, millions have marched on their nation’s capitals. Port workers and unionists in countries like Italy, South Africa, and Belgium have refused to load ships with military cargo. Countries like Chile, Colombia, Spain, and Ireland have adopted an arms embargo. South Africa has filed a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Students around the world have protested their institutions’ complicity in genocide. Mass actions of solidarity have swept every sector of society: from celebrities displaying their solidarity across world stages, to small businesses shuttering their doors on international days of action. These developments reveal a shift in consciousness – an irreversible shift that no weapon of mass destruction, no tech firm, no military occupation, no nuclear power can ever destroy: it has created millions of people across the world who have pledged a lifetime commitment to upturn the system that has made this genocide possible in the first place.
Despite this mass movement that has erupted and been sustained across the globe for almost two years, the Zionist movement has attempted to distort, discredit and defy all logic to undermine the historic, popular support for Palestine that has taken the world by storm. However, their attempts to repress, threaten and target Pro-Palestinians have not only failed but have ignited a shift in global consciousness: an affirmation that the Zionist project is a genocidal one that the masses of the world must confront.
Anti-Genocide Pledge
It is against this backdrop, that Palestinians in the Arab world and the diaspora have drafted a set of political demands calling on the world to formalize their commitment to end the genocide. Within hours of launching, almost 10,000 people across 93 countries had already pledged and took social media by storm, with dozens of organizations posting the pledge. The pledge is in direct confrontation with the attempts to erase the mass character of our movement.
Signatures from prominent leaders including former Palestinian political prisoner Omar Assaf, Gazan journalist Abed Abubakr, and Sana’ Daqqah, activist, journalist, and wife of the martyred Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqah.
The pledge highlights seven fundamental demands as a foundation for national unity:
- Denounce the genocide against the Palestinian people,
- Denounce the use of starvation by Israeli forces as a weapon of war,
- Support an immediate ceasefire,
- Oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestine,
- Affirm the right of Palestinians to return to their land,
- Demand an arms embargo against Israel,
- And call for the liberation of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israeli forces.
These demands reflect the political aspirations of the Palestinian people everywhere. At a time where powerful forces are attempting to divide the Palestinian struggle: unity is our weapon. The U.S is currently attempting to fragment the movement for liberation: deporting students and detaining student leaders like Mahmoud Khalil; they are trying to separate the Palestinian cause from the rest of the Arab world; putting in motion normalization deals and trillion dollar contracts with Gulf states; and they are trying to separate Gaza from the rest of the world by imposing a total siege that is threatening to kill tens of thousands of babies in Gaza through starvation. We must, more than ever, combat this strategy with our own: a mass and global movement that is unwavering in our demands.
Why now?
This pledge is being launched now because we are at a critical juncture in world history taking place on two fronts. The first front is in Gaza, where our people are being ethnically cleansed: entire neighbourhoods are being destroyed, children are being orphaned, entire families are being wiped out, and man made starvation is being inflicted on our people.
The second front is in the western world, where Israel, the US, and other western governments are embracing the “political solution” of displacement and siege. We have a responsibility to insist that people of conscience around the world stand with Gaza, oppose this “political solution” and understand that the only path to Palestinian liberation is through the demands outlined in the anti-genocide pledge.
As Israel openly discusses their plans to impose a final solution on Palestinians in Gaza, they have launched an insidious scheme that weaponizes aid in an attempt to quiet international condemnation of their actions. For the first time in months, international groups like Amnesty International, Oxfam, even states like Canada, UK, and France have openly condemned Israel’s forced starvation of a population that has barely survived a full scale genocide. This aid scheme would allow a small distribution of aid along the southern part of Gaza, in order to kettle Palestinians into a small area and carpet bomb the rest of Gaza. This plan, to disassemble Gaza, to throw people from one part of the Strip to the other, to leave piles of rubble and martyrs along the way is not just an attack on the Palestinian people or the struggle: it is an attack on humanity itself.
The strategy of conquest led by Israel and the US would allow Trump to secure his trillion dollar business deals in the Gulf, increasing the profit of America’s network of billionaires who have seized power; and it would allow Israel to end their genocidal campaign with the only conclusion that will satisfy them and their settlers: complete extermination of Gazans.
The people’s movement
This critical moment demands of us concrete actions. And that is precisely what people across the world have done. In the void filled by international human rights organizations, the UN, and nation states, people have taken it upon themselves to confront this moment.
There has been a visible shift that has moved from tens of thousands of people pouring into the streets of every major city across the world into targeted work that attempts to end the flow of weapons; to get aid into Gaza; to release Palestinian prisoners. In recent months, the global movement for Palestine has taken bolder and braver steps. Activists boarded onto the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, risking their lives to deliver life-saving humanitarian aid, only to be targeted by an Israeli drone strike. International organizers have launched the “March to Gaza” campaign, with hundreds planning to travel to Egypt and march to Rafah in order to demand the flow of aid. For over seven months, a grassroots people’s arms embargo against Maersk — the largest shipping company in the world – has taken the logistics and weapons industry by whirlwind. These efforts represent a growing popular demand that everyday people have now committed their lives to: an end to the genocide and the occupation of Palestine and a full rejection of Zionism and imperialism.
No way forward but freedom
This moment is, above all, an ultimatum for those international institutions, states, and decision-making bodies who have feigned concern for nearly 20 months of genocide while either standing by in silence or aiding and abetting in the slaughter themselves. Israel, its allies, and all those that helped sustain this genocide will one day have to reckon with their crimes. We must, through tools such as the anti-genocide pledge, mark that the majority of the world stood against the first ever live-streamed genocide; that the world was not silent.
Ultimately, this moment is an ultimatum for all those who have either stood on the sidelines or those who have bloodied their hands with the massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinian children: to seal their own fate as cowards and shills for the forces of Zionism and imperialism. On the other side, the side of the majority, we have those who have made clear not just through words but through actions that they stand for dignity and justice. The line has been drawn in history between those who will harness whatever power they have to end this waking nightmare, and those who will be complicit in all that has been done, and has yet to be done to the Palestinian people.
Only one question remains. Where do you stand? Do you stand on the side of genocide, or on the side of humanity?
This is why we must pledge Anti-Genocide. This is why we must choose Palestine wholeheartedly, in every decision, in every question, in every moment of our lives. Choose Palestine because our world and the fate of humanity entirely depends on it.
Join the Anti Genocide pledge at http://antigenocidepledge.com/
*Featured Image: Students for Justice in Palestine at The Ohio State University (SJP-OSU) hold the ‘From the River to The Sea’ banner at the Day of Resistance Protest in Columbus, Ohio, October 13, 2023. (Photo: Paul Becker/Becker1999)