Israel’s genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians grinds on, destroying Gaza and causing a catastrophic human and environmental disaster of untold proportions.
On the occasion of COP29, we call on all civil society organisations at COP29 and around the world to mobilise urgently to impose an energy embargo on Israel to stop the genocide in Palestine and put an end to Israel’s apartheid, illegal occupation and ecocide. At least 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza have now been killed, with estimates that the death toll is likely far larger. Many thousands are buried under the rubble of their homes, with hundreds of thousands of others suffering from severe physical injuries and mental scars, and most of Gaza’s population deliberately starved and undernourished, forcibly displaced in tents. The situation is more horrifying in the north of Gaza where Israel is committing massacres and ethnic cleansing. Many thousands more are being held in Israel’s network of torture camps, subject to the most barbaric treatment imaginable. This shocking human cost has been combined with an appalling ecological destruction, intentionally inflicted on Gaza to make it uninhabitable. According to UN human experts, Israel’s genocide has also included “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide.”
Since the start of the genocide, more than 76% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed, and there has been extensive damage to soil, green houses, water wells, farms and animal shelters. Israel’s genocidal war has emitted hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions, equal to 31,000 kilotons of coal – enough to power about 15.8 coal-fired power plants for a year. During the first 120 days alone, this produced more CO2 than the annual emissions of 26 countries and territories. The CO2 emissions that will be produced during the rebuilding of Gaza’s devastated urban landscape will produce a figure higher than that of over 130 countries. Chemicals from weapons such as white phosphorus have also contaminated the air, and likely impacted agricultural land and soil. Meanwhile in the West Bank, the Israeli occupation has continued its colonization and theft of Palestinian land and natural resources for illegal settlements, killing approximately 800 Palestinians and injuring thousands of others in the process. This is despite the International Court of Justice declaring in July 2024 that Israel’s entire occupation is illegal and must be brought to an end.
The international community’s failure to end state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s genocide and underlying system of apartheid – and to impose legal, targeted sanctions to stop Israel’s war machine – has emboldened it with a sense of complete impunity, giving it carte blanche to spread its destruction and massacres beyond Palestine to the people of Lebanon. In just a few weeks, Israel killed more than 2,000 Lebanese citizens, injuring more than 10,000 and wantonly destroying thousands of homes and entire villages. It is clear from Israel’s bombardment that it intends to spread its genocidal pattern of destruction – targeting hospitals, medical staff and civilian infrastructure – to the people of Lebanon. Israel’s use of white phosphorus and cluster munitions has devastated agricultural production in south Lebanon, and its direct attack on the Litani water conveyance system demonstrates that such destruction is intentional.
Israel’s plans are now clear as day: to ethnically cleanse the entirety of Palestine and the south of Lebanon of their indigenous peoples, a continuation of the ongoing Nakba that has gone on, unabated, since 1948 until the present day. In this context, the international community’s delayed demand for a ceasefire in Gaza is meaningless unless backed up by concrete actions that can stop Israel’s genocidal war machine. The governments and corporations profiting from and supporting a financial system and socio-economic order destroying our planet, indigenous lands and forcing millions of people into exile and poverty, are the very ones complicit in powering and fuelling Israel’s genocidal machine.
Links:
Energy Embargo Now to End the Genocide!
