The occupied Palestinian territory [OPT] today is a hellscape. In Gaza, Israel has dismantled even the last United Nations function — humanitarian aid — in order to deliberately starve, displace time and again, or kill a population they have marked for elimination. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing advances through unlawful siege, mass displacement, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, widespread torture.

Across all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world. The very few Israeli people who stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid — while the majority openly cheers and calls for more — remind us that Israeli liberation, too, is inseparable from Palestinian freedom.

The atrocities of the past twenty-one months are not a sudden aberration; they are the culmination of decades of policies to displace and replace the Palestinian people.

Against this backdrop, it is inconceivable that political forums, from Brussels to New York, are still debating recognition of the state of Palestine — not because it’s unimportant, but because for thirty-five years, states have stalled and refused recognition, pretending to “invest in the Palestinian Authority” while abandoning the Palestinian people to Israel’s relentless, rapacious territorial ambitions and unspeakable crimes.

Meanwhile, political discourse has reduced Palestine to a humanitarian crisis to manage in perpetuity rather than a political issue demanding principled and firm resolution: end permanent occupation, apartheid, and today genocide. And it is not the law that has failed or faltered — it is political will that has abdicated.

But today, we are also witnessing a rupture. Palestine’s immense suffering has cracked open the possibility of transformation. Even if this is not fully reflected in political agendas yet, a revolutionary shift is underway — one that, if sustained, will be remembered as a moment when history changed course. This is why I came to this meeting with a sense of being at a historical turning point, discursively and politically.

First, the narrative is shifting: away from Israel’s endlessly invoked “right to self-defense” and toward the long-denied Palestinian right to self-determination — systematically invisibilized, suppressed, and delegitimized for decades. The weaponization of antisemitism applied to Palestinian words and narratives, and the dehumanizing use of the terrorism framework for Palestinian action (from armed resistance to the work of NGOs pursuing justice in the international arena), has led to a global political paralysis that has been intentional. It must be redressed. The time is now.

Second, and consequentially, we are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism: principled, courageous, increasingly led by the global majority. It pains me that I have yet to see this robustly include European countries. As a European, I fear what the region and its institutions have come to symbolize to many: a sodality of states preaching international law yet guided more by colonial mindset than principle, acting as vassals to the US empire, even as it drags us from war to war, misery to misery — and when it comes to Palestine, from silence to complicity.

But the presence of European countries at this meeting shows that a different path is possible. To them I say: the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just a coalition but a new moral center in world politics. Please, stand with them. Millions are watching — hoping — for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity, and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us.

Principled states must rise to this moment. It does not need to have a political allegiance, color, political party flags, or ideologies: it needs to be upheld by basic human values. Those that Israel has been mercilessly crushing for twenty-one months now.

Meanwhile, I applaud the calling of this emergency conference in Bogotá to address the unrelenting devastation in Gaza. So it is on this that focus must be directed. The measures adopted in January by the Hague Group were symbolically powerful. It was the signal of the discursive and political shift needed.

But they are the absolute bare minimum. I implore you to expand your commitment, and to turn that commitment into concrete actions, legislatively and judicially in each of your jurisdictions, and to consider first and foremost what must we do to stop the genocidal onslaught. For Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, this question is existential. But it really is applicable to the humanity of all of us.

In this context, my responsibility here is to recommend to you, uncompromisingly and dispassionately, the cure for the root cause. We are long past dealing with symptoms, the comfort zone of too many these days. And my words will show that what the Hague Group has committed to do and is considering expanding upon is a small commitment toward what’s just and due based on your obligations under international law — obligations, not sympathy, not charity.

Each state [must] immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel: their military, strategic, political, diplomatic, economic relations — both imports and exports — and make sure that their private sector, insurers, banks, pension funds, universities, and other goods and service providers in the supply chains do the same. Treating the occupation as business as usual translates into supporting or providing aid or assistance to the unlawful presence of Israel in the OPT. These ties must be terminated as a matter of urgency.

Let’s be clear: I mean cutting ties with Israel as a whole. Cutting ties only with the “components” of it in the OPT is not an option.

This is in line with the duty on all states stemming from the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion that confirmed the illegality of Israel’s prolonged occupation, which it declared tantamount to racial segregation and apartheid. The UN General Assembly adopted that opinion. These findings are more than sufficient for action.

Further, it is the state of Israel that is accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, so it is the state that must be responsible for its wrongdoings. As I argued in my last report to the Human Rights Council, the Israeli economy is structured to sustain the occupation and has now turned genocidal. It is impossible to disentangle Israel’s state policies and economy from its long-standing policies and economy of occupation.

It has been inseparable for decades. The longer states and others stay engaged, the more this illegality at its heart is legitimized. This is the complicity. Now that the economy has turned genocidal, there is no “good” Israel and “bad” Israel.

I ask you to consider this moment as if we were sitting here in the 1990s, discussing the case of apartheid South Africa. Would you have proposed selective sanctions on SA for its conduct in individual Bantustans? Or would you have recognized the state’s criminal system as a whole? And here, what Israel is doing is worse. This comparison is a legal and factual assessment supported by international legal proceedings that many in this room are part of.

This is what concrete measures mean. Negotiating with Israel on how to manage what remains of Gaza and West Bank, in Brussels or elsewhere, is an utter dishonor to international law.

And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter — not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.