200+ global leaders call UN to end Israeli apartheid, impunity
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Over 200 global leaders urge the UN to dismantle Israeli apartheid, citing the Gaza genocide and decades of crimes against Palestinians.
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The sun sets behind buildings that were destroyed during the Israeli ground and air operations in the northern Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine, Friday, Aug. 8, 2025 (AP)
Over 200 prominent global figures, including political leaders, academics, human rights advocates, journalists, religious scholars, and cultural icons, have jointly addressed a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, urging the dismantling of apartheid and demanding an end to impunity for the crimes committed by "Israel" against the Palestinian people.
In a letter, the signatories warn that “silence has become complicity and hesitation a betrayal of the very Charter upon which the United Nations was founded,” while accusing "Israel" of carrying out what they describe as “one of the most extensive massacres in modern history” in Gaza, where more than 60,000 Palestinians, including over 17,000 children, were killed and over two million displaced.
The letter presents what it calls “seven myths” that have sustained "Israel’s" oppression since before its creation. It describes the 1948 Nakba as a “deliberate erasure” of the indigenous Palestinian people, with over 500 villages destroyed and more than 700,000 Palestinians made stateless, and rejects the narrative of "Israel’s" “birth” as a lawful or just event.
The signatories trace a continuous legacy of violence, referencing the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila atrocities, the 2002 Jenin assault, the repeated Gaza bombardments between 2008 and 2021, and the ongoing devastation since October 7, 2023, asserting that these events collectively reveal what they describe as "a deliberate project of colonial expansion, racial domination, and cultural erasure, underpinned by… legal impunity."
The appeal condemns "Israel's" June 2025 war on Iran as an unprovoked act of aggression against a sovereign state, accuses it of "normalising assassination" as a state policy, and warns that the regime's "vast apparatus of disinformation" has been used to criminalize resistance, silence dissent, and invert the moral order by branding victims as aggressors.
Palestine has right to resist
The letter affirms the Palestinian right to resist occupation under UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 while maintaining that true justice requires what it describes as "a democratic referendum, inclusive of all indigenous inhabitants, be they Muslim, Christian, or Jew, and excluding those settled by colonial force."
The signatories declare Zionism to be "not reformable" and characterize the Israeli state as "inherently exploitative, oppressive, war-mongering and unjust," calling for its dissolution as a political and legal entity. They pressed the United Nations to take what they describe as "urgent and unequivocal action," not just in response to the 2025 atrocities but as what they frame as "a historical reckoning for the accumulated crimes committed over more than a century against the Palestinian people."
The letter concludes by calling for "Liberation from apartheid. Liberation from impunity. Liberation from a structure that for more than 80 years has perpetuated occupation, dispossession, and mass murder," while asserting that "no arsenal of lies, no machinery of occupation, and no doctrine of impunity can withstand the long moral reckoning that history demands."
