🔘 continued 🔘
2. Denial of the existence of the Palestinian people
11. Second, Israel denies the existence of Palestinians as a people. The Israeli Minister of Finance, himself an illegal settler, has stated that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. Senior Israeli leaders routinely deny that the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination.
12. Moreover, the case brought by South Africa which Belize fully supports lays bare the fact that Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza also denies the right of Palestinians to exist at all.
13. One key tactic in this regard is Israel’s deliberate use of starvation to destroy the civilian population of Gaza. Gaza’s entire population of more than two million people is in crisis, facing the “worst levels of acute food insecurity”. By December 2023, the famine threshold had already been exceeded and the situation was deteriorating rapidly. This famine is not an accident. Indeed, senior Israeli officials have already clearly stated their intent to deprive civilians in Gaza of food and water.
14. In its planned erasure of the Palestinian people, Israel is also destroying Palestinian cultural, educational and historical institutions in Gaza. Almost 400 schools and every single university have been partially or fully destroyed, including one which was used as a base and interrogation centre by Israeli forces for months before they pillaged it and then detonated it. The intention is to erase all traces of Palestinian life and culture, to destroy the very essence of what makes the Palestinians a “people”. The message is clear: the total culture of Palestine must be destroyed and they must have no future in Gaza.