Arab League urges immediate international action to protect Palestinians

The Arab League's foreign ministers have urged the international community to take immediate action to protect Palestinians from Israeli actions and support Gaza's reconstruction efforts. At the 166th regular session of the Arab League, held in Cairo, the council of foreign ministers called on the international community, including the United Nations, Security Council, and signatories to the Fourth Geneva Convention, to intervene urgently to safeguard the Palestinian people from Israeli crimes, aggression, and settler terrorism.

In their resolutions, the council emphasized the need for political, financial, and legal support for an Arab-Islamic plan for recovery and reconstruction in Gaza, as well as for the Palestinian people to remain on their land. The Arab League condemned Israel's genocide, starvation, siege, aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

They called for the full implementation of the Gaza ceasefire agreement and UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025) to halt Israeli aggression, facilitate Gaza's reconstruction, and enable Palestinians to exercise their right to self-determination and statehood. The council also denounced Israeli plans to annex occupied West Bank territories, including East Jerusalem, and impose Israeli sovereignty, forcing displacement, demolishing homes, seizing private and public lands, and establishing checkpoints to divide the West Bank into isolated areas.

They stressed that any annexation of Palestinian territories would constitute a war crime. The Arab League considered Israel's ongoing aggression and occupation of the Palestinian land and people as a threat to Arab national security and a destabilization of international peace and security. They called for strengthening joint Arab action to protect Palestinians, including activating joint defense mechanisms and safeguarding Arab countries' interests, security, sovereignty, and territorial integrity in accordance with international law and the UN Charter.

The council rejected any displacement of Palestinians from their land or alteration of their demographic composition, rejecting Israeli claims of "voluntary migration" as genocide and ethnic cleansing. They firmly rejected all measures aimed at fragmenting the geographic and demographic unity of Palestinians, including attempts to separate Gaza from the occupied West Bank, impose different regimes, or use terms like "New Gaza" or "Gaza people."

The council affirmed Palestinians' unity irrespective of their location and condemned the demolition and seizure of the UNRWA headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah by Israeli authorities, its conversion into a museum and Israeli Ministry of Security office, and the closure of UNRWA offices, schools, and health centers in Jerusalem. The council welcomed the UN General Assembly's decision to renew UNRWA's mandate for three years (2026-2029) and condemned Israeli attacks on UNRWA facilities, resulting in the deaths of over 350 agency employees, injuries to hundreds, and the destruction of around 315 UNRWA facilities.

The Arab League urged member states to pay their assessed contributions to UNRWA and encouraged exceptional contributions and the signing of multi-year bilateral agreements to support the agency.