Posted by: John Phoenix
By International People’s Tribunal
The International People’s Tribunal for Palestine will expose all who are complicit in these crimes and serve as a rallying call for global boycotts and mass movements to support Palestinian liberation.
As we pass one month of the ceasefire agreement signed between Israel and the Palestinian Resistance, the former has continued to consistently violate the agreement on a daily basis. Israel has killed at least 250 people since the agreement came into effect, and it has continued to occupy 58 per cent of Gaza through an arbitrary ‘yellow line’, to which they have supposedly withdrawn. This comes as Israel has continued to bomb South Lebanon, breaking its other ceasefire agreement with the country, nearly 300 times in just over a year.
Israel’s behavior and intentions are not born out of a vacuum, nor did they start with Israel’s genocidal ‘response’ to the Al Aqsa Flood over two years ago. Rather, all of this is part and parcel of the settler-colonial Zionist project: to occupy, steal, and settle on Palestinian land – even if that means reducing the land to dust.
At the same time, illegal settlement construction has reached a record amount of settlements being constructed and settler attacks on Palestinian villages and farms in the West Bank have reached record highs. As the 2025 olive harvest came to a close in Palestine, the direct connection between the attacks against the Palestinian people and the attacks against Palestinian land itself was made devastatingly clear.
There have been 114 officially documented Israeli settlements built in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, a record number in the span of two years. With new settlements come waves of Israeli settlers; most of them are instilled with the racist ideology of Zionism and an intention to displace the indigenous Palestinian population through mass lynch-mob violence. This violence has also targeted Palestinian olive trees, a symbol of national pride and economic livelihood for generations of farmers throughout Palestine.
Over 4,000 olive trees and saplings in nearly 60 villages were destroyed by settlers during the 2025 olive harvest, a nearly 400 percent increase since last year. The total losses from tree destruction alone during the first 13 days of October exceed $1 million. Settler attacks during this month reached a record high in 20 years, with 264 attacks against Palestinians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Israeli settlements contribute to the all-around destruction and depletion of the natural environment. Settlers consume water at 13 times the rate of Palestinian residents in the vulnerable desert environment. Settlements also discharge 40 million cubic meters of untreated domestic and industrial wastewater annually into Palestinian lands, contaminating critical water sources and ecosystems. Even prior to 2023, Zionist settlers had uprooted olive trees and other native plants to replace them with invasive pine trees, marking not only the destruction of biodiversity and soil erosion, but an intentional erasure of Arab cultural history.
The destruction of Palestinian communities and the harm done to the land itself is nothing new. After 1948, the Zionist occupation systematically created an unequal and violent structure in which the Palestinian people would have no control over their resources or economy.
The Nakba ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their land with the intent to bar them from ever returning, laying the basis for Israel’s inherently colonial existence on indigenous Palestinian land. Following the occupation’s spread to the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, even more Palestinian land was confiscated to expand settlements, destroying Palestinian industrial and agricultural development.
These two aspects – colonial settlement and deliberate destruction of the land and the ability to produce on it – are intrinsically connected within the Zionist project. It manifests in the widespread and long-term destruction of the environment, uprooting and destroying an entire people. This act is what has come to be referred to as ecocide, and it is inseparable from genocide in Palestine.
Officially defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment,” ecocide draws from several international legal instruments, notably the Geneva Conventions, Rome Statute, and human rights law, as well as the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). International legal cases have drawn on ecocide language in attempts to charge accountability for Agent Orange usage in Vietnam, oil spills in the Niger Delta, destruction from the Alberta Tar Sands extraction, and Indonesian palm oil deforestation.
Ecocide, thus, becomes a chargeable crime not only for Israel’s actions in the West Bank, but for the genocidal war in Gaza as well. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), close to 95% of Gaza’s cropland has been either damaged or destroyed, with only 1.5 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land being consistently accessible and undamaged. As of October 2025, at least 80 percent of all greenhouses in Gaza have been damaged, with hundreds of wells destroyed.
Diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and poliovirus have been rapidly spreading among the population in Gaza due to the complete destruction of health and sanitation infrastructure, alongside the environmental catastrophe. The soil of Gaza is becoming diseased as well with debris, munitions, and sewage seeping deep due to the destruction of sanitation systems as well.
Israel, its US and European backers, and all corporations and other entities complicit in these wanton acts of ecocide and genocide must be held accountable for these crimes. Additionally, any actions taken must consider the full weight of Israel’s historic colonial project in Palestine and must not treat the situation since October 7, 2023, as an isolated case.
The “Right to Resist” International People’s Tribunal on Palestine is being convened in Barcelona this November 22nd and 23rd for this very reason. Led by the International League of People’s Struggle, International People’s Front, the People’s Coalition for Food Sovereignty, and endorsed by over 100 organizations and institutions, it will expose the extent of the ecocide and forced starvation by Israel and its backers, mobilize international solidarity, and serve as a forum for victims and survivors to testify and exact accountability.
The Tribunal will serve as both a legal and political action initiated by the people, in solidarity with the Palestinian national liberation struggle for self-determination. It will not only expose the historical record of crimes against the Palestinian people, but will also serve as a rallying call to pressure governments and international institutions around the world to cut their ties with Israel.
The indictment and verdict of the International People’s Tribunal for Palestine will not only act as documents for the courts. They will stand as tools for the mass movements and the national liberation struggle for a completely free Palestine, where the land and its environment will be stewarded by its historic people, free from oppression and occupation.
– The International People’s Tribunal for Palestine is a civil society initiative organized by international grassroots organizations. It aims to establish a historical record of crimes against the Palestinian people, mobilize international solidarity, and exert moral and political pressure on complicit governments and international institutions. Learn more about the tribunal: https://internationalsolidarity.org/tribunal/ This article was contributed to the Palestine Chronicle.