Solidarity Statement - (Nov 2025)

A CEASEFIRE WITHOUT JUSTICE

The Sector’s Normalization of Occupation and Apartheid

November 11, 2025 - As Development, Humanitarian, and Philanthropy Professionals, we welcome the ceasefire signed on October 9, 2025, for what it represented to Palestinians: a moment to breathe, to access essential aid, to bury their dead. This temporary reprieve matters profoundly. 

But let us be clear: this ceasefire, existing only in name, does not address the root causes of apartheid and occupation.

Since the start of the ceasefire, the Gaza Ministry of Health has reported 236 deaths and 600 injuries in Gaza due to Israeli attacks. Public health experts estimate that the true death toll may be 40% higher than official figures, with 3 million life-years in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Despite international humanitarian law mandating the unimpeded passage of relief (Additional Protocol I, Article 70), Israel imposed renewed restrictions on aid, failed to uphold safe zones, and continued airstrikes on civilians. Simultaneously, Israel has escalated violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli settlers, with military support, have carried out 2,300 attacks and established new illegal outposts, further encroaching on Palestinian land.  

At a deeper level, a fully honored ceasefire does not address the root cause of violence, and Palestinians need an end to apartheid and occupation to fulfill their right to self-determination and their right of return. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying power must ensure the welfare of the protected population (Article 55) and facilitate relief schemes (Article 59). Instead, Israel has repeatedly denied Palestinians the right to return, blocked economic development, and weaponized aid as a tool of control. Israel’s war crimes include arbitrary detention of civilians, including children, and systematic sexual violence and torture against Palestinians at checkpoints and in detention centers. As long as Israel continues to occupy Palestine, it will continue to violate the human rights of the Palestinian people.

Palestinian Leadership Is Essential

For decades, the development and humanitarian sectors have poured resources into managing the consequences of occupation rather than confronting its existence. This has often meant creating conditions of dependency, marginalizing Palestinian leadership, and framing occupation as a “humanitarian problem” rather than a political crime. Palestinians do not need a better-managed occupation. 

For 78 years, Palestinian organizations have operated under conditions that would end most international operations. They have documented violations, delivered aid, and organized resistance while facing harassment, detention, and attacks. Since October 7, 2023, over 543 aid workers have been killed in Gaza, the majority of them Palestinian. In the West Bank, Israel has also destroyed facilities and arrested civil society leaders of organizations such as the Freedom Theater in Jenin. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship continue to face discrimination, which has escalated since October 2023. Despite these realities, international reconstruction plans continue to sideline Palestinian voices and thought leadership, centering companies and organizations complicit in genocide and apartheid. Palestinian organizations need resources, political support, and the removal of systems constraining their work. The development and humanitarian sectors must do better than treating Palestinian groups as mere "implementing partners" of international agendas forced upon them. Instead, the sectors must:

• Fund Palestinian-led initiatives, trusting communities to determine priorities.

• Support Palestinian-led advocacy and grassroots-led work, including calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

• Recognize that Palestinian movements possess legitimacy and expertise that international NGOs lack.

• Protect and support Palestinian Civil Society, within Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and 1948 areas,  especially organisations working on human rights 

Reject the Normalization of Occupation

Israel is not a humanitarian actor. It is a colonial regime. It determines what aid and resources enter Gaza and who can deliver it. Israel has repeatedly violated its international obligation to allow free passage of relief (Article 23, Fourth Geneva Convention), creating conditions of famine through its blockade and targeting of food production and distribution within Gaza. 

Engagement with Israeli entities is forced by Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and is not neutral “coordination.” When necessary, such engagement must be:

• Minimized to what is essential.

• Accountable to Palestinians through constant consultation with civil society and community leaders, while being critical of actors like the Palestinian Authority for their role in enabling the occupation of Gaza.

• Continuously re-evaluated as conditions change.

• Explicitly named as complicity under duress, while working to eliminate those conditions. 

As long as Israel maintains absolute control, the sector must minimize harm, maintain accountability to Palestinians, and never lose sight of ending the conditions of occupation and apartheid. 

Our Responsibility as Development and Humanitarian Professionals

We – all development and humanitarian professionals, organizations, and funders, including governments providing aid – must hold Israel accountable for violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Genocide Convention, and we must hold our own governments accountable for their complicity via their political, military, and economic support to Israel. This includes demanding an end to settlement expansion, occupation, and ethnic cleansing.

Humanitarian access under occupation is not a privilege granted by Israel; it is a right under international law. Access under occupation is permission, not freedom. Managing apartheid’s symptoms is complicity, not solidarity.

We Call Upon All Global Development and Humanitarian Organizations and Funders to:

1. Immediately Divest from Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, Occupation, and Apartheid
Cease funding programs which aid and abet genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid (Article 54, Additional Protocol I) and collective punishment (Article 33, Fourth Geneva Convention). End all projects conditioned on political alignment or compliance with Israel’s restrictions. Refuse to work with organizations that promote eugenics, racism, or discrimination against Palestinians and/or advocate against Palestinians’ right to return. Divest direct partnerships, investments, and foundation endowments from Israeli arms and military-linked companies.

2. Fund Palestinian Self-Determination
Redirect resources toward Palestinian-led organizations. Fund work that is accountable to Palestinian communities. Ensure Palestinian-led decision-making in humanitarian and reconstruction work, Right to Return efforts, and dismantling apartheid and occupation.

3. Transform Aid Structures
Support alternative aid architectures rooted in Palestinian self-determination, Palestinian-led efforts to rebuild Gaza, and repairing harm enacted through the sector’s long-term complicity in the occupation, apartheid, and genocide, by establishing community-governed funds, flexible multi-year financing, and locally defined measures of accountability that refuse complicity with occupation and actively seek to end the systems causing harm rather than managing them. 

4. Enforce International Accountability, Including in Aid
Use funding leverage to require humanitarian organizations to take explicit positions against apartheid and oppression, cease operations demanding political compromise, and redirect expertise toward Palestinian-led initiatives. Demand that all country governments enforce the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants and adhere to their obligations.

5. Build Collective Critical Consciousness
Recognize that the current aid system serves imperial and colonial interests, enabling wealth accumulation by powerful states, while masking complicity through “aid.” We must build a collective critical consciousness about how our work either reinforces or challenges colonization in the service of white supremacy and engage in reflection and action at both the individual and collective levels to ensure our work is creating a more equitable world. 

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