Dear Friends,
We are writing this end-of-year newsletter with heavy hearts, during the darkest days the Palestinian people have lived through since the 1948 Nakba. The events that we have been witnessing – and our colleagues have been subjected to – over the last two months in the ever-more tightly besieged Gaza Strip, are beyond imagination, tearing at our shared humanity, and are a genocide in the making. To date, more than 18,608 Palestinians, including around 7,729 children and 5,153 women, have been killed during the war, with extended families totally wiped out. An estimated 50,594 have been injured, and nearly 85% of the total population have been internally displaced (OCHA-OPT, 13 December 2023).
Adalah calls for an immediate ceasefire, the provision of unhindered humanitarian aid, and accountability. All states have a duty to prevent, and not to aid and abet, the crime of genocide, and we call on the international community to adhere to their legal obligations.
2023 as a whole was a catastrophic year in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Before the outbreak of the War on 7 October, a central component of the radical new Israeli right-wing government’s platform was the overhaul of the Israeli judiciary by stripping powers from the Supreme Court. While huge numbers of Jewish-Israeli citizens protested for months over the judicial overhaul, the Knesset enacted a raft of laws that violated the basic rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI). In the OPT, the Israeli military and settlers committed some of the most extreme violence that we have witnessed in decades against Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly in the Jenin Refugee Camp and in Nablus.
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