Rabia İclal Turan
30 June 2025•Update: 30 June 2025
WASHINGTON / NEW YORK
Palestinian deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Majed Bamya, on Monday warned that Israel’s ongoing violations of the UN Security Council resolutions without accountability are enabling the continuation of war crimes and illegal acts across the occupied Palestinian territories.
Speaking during a Security Council session on the situation in the Middle East, Bamya said: “The price of not holding those who breach the resolutions of this council accountable (is) ... the perpetuation of crimes and illegal actions.”
He pointed to decades-long international condemnation of Israeli settlements, which have nevertheless continued unabated due to what he described as a lack of accountability.
“This is day 632 and the slaughter is ongoing. There is nothing that can justify a genocide. A nation is fighting for its survival, faced with an existential threat,” he continued.
Bamya decried the Security Council’s repeated meetings while the genocide continues, saying decisions to hold perpetrators accountable, halt the killing, and allow aid to enter Gaza “in a dignified manner” can no longer be deferred.
“There is something unbearable and, honestly, a bit humiliating about having to proclaim over and over again that we are part of humanity and that we should be treated as human beings,” he said.
Palestinians, he added, “were not born to live their lives under foreign occupation or to endure repeatedly death and destruction, displacement and dispossession.”
“There should be consensus against these criminal options,” he continued, lamenting: “But when it comes to the Palestinian people… we have an experience, when it comes to us, to see people justify the unjustifiable.”
Calling for a political resolution, Bamya said: “There is no viable solution without an independent and sovereign state of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side by side with Israel in peace and security.”
He concluded by calling for aid to be delivered with dignity, not as “a means to forcibly displace (Palestinians), squeeze them into part of the territory, make them desperate, further humiliate them.”
“We ask to be treated as human beings,” Bamya said. “That’s not too much to ask.”
The Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 56,500 Palestinians so far, most of them women and children.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.
