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[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of remarks I made as President of the International Gaza Tribunal at the opening of the Palestine Day observance organized by the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum and the munipality of Konya in Turkey on October 2, 2026. It is my most coneptually ambitious attempt to distinguish the role of a traditional legal tribunal, here associated with the International Court of Justice, the highest judicial organ of the United Nations, and the International Gaza Tribunal seeking to gain control of symbolic battlefields in the Legitimacy War decisively won by Palestine in post-October 7th encounters, and now continuing beneath the shadows cast be the Trump ‘peace’ diplomay. It is my impression that the public discourse ignores this distinction between these two parallel approaches to law and justice]
Good morning and welcome to all of you attending this important timely event dedicated to the observance of Palestine Day in this beautiful Turkish city of Konya. Speaking personally, it is my great honor to offer some preliminary remarks and participate together with Professors Penny Green and Hilal Elver as representatives of the International Gaza Tribunal (IGT) at this opening session of the Palestine Day Conference organized by the Islamic Cooperation Youth Forum (ICYF) held here in historic and vibrant Konya, a city that both exemplifies modern Turkey and retains the mystical charm of Rumi’s spirituality.
The three of us were encouraged to take the lead in establishing the International Gaza Tribunal with the objective of producing an objective, fact-based confirmation from the perspectives of law and morality to allegations and perceptions that Israel’s retaliation to being attacked from Gaza on October 7, 2023 constituted genocide. A further reason for turning to civil society activism was the disappointment with the failures of the established international public order to stop Israel from continuing its violent assault, failing even to reach consensus even to pause the violence much less reach an enforceable judgment of Israel’s behavior given the complicity of leading Western countries, above all the United States.
This civil society initiative of the IGT can also be justified symbolically as an expression of frustration that neither the UN nor Western geopolitical political actors possess the capability or political will to establish a permanent ceasefire after an entire year of observing unchecked Israel’s violence mainly directed at Gaza’s helpless, long victimized civilian population and infrastructure. The IGT has existed for over two years, its energies focused on the goals of giving public discourse a definitive, comprehensive, and fact-based rationale for treating Israel’s violent retaliation as a case of transparent genocide. This genocidal narrative was often better understood in real time by the peoples of the world than by their political leaders entrapped be a web of foreign policy alliances and a bad habit of political realism that encourages deference to power rather than the promotion of justice. Thanks to journalistic courage in the face of Israeli targeting and obstruction of honest reportage and digital means of transmission the eyes and ears of the public encountered the realities of genocide and reacted with an increasing outrage. In fulfilling its truthtelling mission the IGT is profoundly grateful to the Islamic Cooperative Youth Forum (or ICYF) for its sponsorship and support from the outset of our efforts, and never once interfering with the ground rules of IGT independence that were mutually agreed upon as the basis of our coordinated efforts.
In this context, the Turkish Contact Group (TCG) led by his excellency, the honorable Taha Ayhan has reinforced our motivations with their insistence that we undertake this challenging undertaking with an overriding commitment on our part to uphold the public interests of humanity as a whole. It was the intention of ICYF as well as in the mind and hearts of those who we persuaded to join this undertaking as advisors, scholars, experts, and witnesses that it was vital to add this solidarity initiative to the struggle of the people of Gaza for the basic rights of the Palestinian people including taking into account the plight of the several million Palestinian refugees and coercively expelled from their homes and homeland, a loss magnified by the demolition of the birthright villages that were part of their shared anguished memories of displacement over the course of decades. Anyone who has visited a Palestinian refugee camp will understand what I am talked about.
IGT participants were in agreement that Israel was depriving Palestinians of their inalienable right of self-determination, which in the course of many anti-colonial struggles became the most sanctified dimension of international human rights law in the historical period following the end of World War II. As an initial corrective to state propaganda and widespread media self-censorship IGT sought to sound a civil society alarm in reaction Israel’s genocidal response to the Gaza attack of October 7th, 2023. The IGT commitment is not only critical of the genocide but remedial, seeking a liberated future for the resumed pursuit of Palestinian national destiny in a format accepted by authentically chosen representatives of the Palestinian people. And in the immediacy of present challenges associated with the persistence of dire emergency life-threatening conditions in Gaza to establish secure supply lines of humanitarian relief. In violation of the terms of October 10, 2025 ceasefire international relief efforts continue to be consistently and unlawfully disrupted by Israel’s genocidal combat tactics and territorial expansionism that persist under the protective cover of Trump’s Peace Plan. Unlike its propagandistic pretentions this plan is not about peace, much less justice. It is about choosing a different approach to its initial objectives. In response, a final goal of IGT, subsequent to the Tribunal sessions, is to influence present and future public education about the existential horrors that resulted from Israel’s recourse to genocide which exposed the moral hypocrisy of the liberal democracies and impotence of the UN. In efforts to disseminate the results of the IGT experience we hope to refute state propaganda and corporate media in the West, the latter long silent about Israel’s crimes and muted about the pre-October 7th context of Gaza oppression accurately depicted as ‘incremental genocide,’ or a more subtle form of annihilistic approach to achieve Palestinian erasure. In effect, it more instructive to view post-October 7 Israeli behavior as one of continuity rather than of discontinuity as propagandists would have us believe. This necessitates also a reinterpretation of the Gaza attack as one of legitimate resistance rather an outburst of terrorists fanatics as our political masters wanted us to believe. In passing that does not exonerate the attackers recourse to violations of international humanitarian law if established by convincing evidence.
As a matter of its own stimulus, the Turkish Contact Group had been inspired by the example of the Russell Tribunal of the mid-1960s which was the first international peoples’ tribunal. This Tribunal was organized and led by two of the most famous public intellectuals of the day, Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, and gathered other intellectuals from a diversity of backgrounds, witnesses, experts, and survivors of the unlawful intervention and interference in the prolonged nationalist struggles of the Vietnamese people for territorial sovereignty and decolonizing political independence. It seems relevant to note that if a researcher seeks an accurate portrayal of the legal controversies associated with the Vietnam War, they have no more helpful starting point that the proceedings of the Russell Tribunal. The same is true for the Iraq War Tribunal of 2005.
My own role in accepting this TCG challenge and throughout the entire process has been guided and helped by my very loyal wife Hilal Elver, herself a distinguished international figure associated particularly with the analysis of food security and the right to food that is intended to apply to everyone under all conditions. This fundamental right has been so devastatingly abused by Israel in the context of its increasingly unlawful occupation of Palestine and especially Gaza (as confirmed by the ICJ Advisory Opinion of July 17, 2024, endorsed by a large majority in a General Assembly Resolution). Israel has deliberately and openly violated ceasefire obligations even during the period of the past year which it had previously formally agreed upon. Israel has shockingly continued to induce systemic starvation in Gaza as a combat tactic, producing famine conditions, thereby becoming a component of its continuing genocidal assault in the pursuit of its altered objective that has shifted its central locus from the elimination of Hamas to the elimination of Palestinians, or put differently, from a supposed counterterrorist military operation to an underlying completion of extending Israel’s territorial sovereignty to the whole of mandate Palestine, and in the process, embodying the Zionist vision of ‘Greater Israel.’
The IGT was from its beginning a controversial and complex undertaking. We felt from the outset that our efforts to be taken seriously and acquire respect as a legitimate civil society initiative must be, as already suggested, an autonomous and activist instrument of civil society opposition to this most serious form of statist wrongdoing. Doing our best to gain public respect explains why we put such a stress on our politically independence of any government and an accompanying rejection of ‘dark money’ funding by donors with vested economic or political interests in the underlying struggle.
Those of us planning IGT also held strong conviction that a peoples’ tribunal operated differently as an investigative and judgmental process than did traditional national and international tribunals that are the creations of governmental and intergovernmental initiatives of sovereign states with an overwhelming assignment of determining guilt or innocence. Because of adopting the terminology of traditional tribunals in our references to witnesses, testimony, and evidence this distinction tends to get lost, making past peoples’ tribunal were easy to dismiss in mainstream public discourse as ‘juridical imposters,’ and of course by Israel’s most unapologetic supporters as antisemitic leftism. Such tribunals as the IGT make themselves vulnerable to accusations of pretending to be lawmaking institutions of parallel competence and authority to traditional courts, which they are certainly not. IGT tried to be careful about labeling its undertaking in ways that minimized confusions of this type of faulty perceptions that made such projects routinely subject to misinterpretation and dismissal in the past. Being clear about this issue of institutional identity required us to be open to self-education as it is often easier to imitate what exist than to innovate on behalf of what is appropriate.
Despite these cautionary words, IGT took respectful account of the parallel efforts of traditional tribunals, particularly of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), that has indirectly contributed to the credibility of IGT by their preliminary findings supportive of our central contention that genocide was not some radical left, populist smear of Israel’s legal right to defend itself and uphold its security in the wake of an armed attack emanating from Gaza. The ICJ, of course unintentionally, reinforced the IGT project by its authoritative assertion that the violence in Gaza is an instance of ‘plausible genocide.’ These dramatic words are tentative as the word ‘plausible’ suggests, and awaits a final legal clarification by the ICJ that is not expected to occur before late 2027 when it issues its final decision. Even this preliminary finding of the ICJ was so widely reported that it removed much of the organized prior stigma associated with naming the violence in Gaza as ‘genocide,’ This ICJ approach definitely contributed positively to the credibility of IGT efforts. The increasing public outcry and delegitimation of Israel as a rogue state illustrates how deeply the language of public discourse matters in situations where the established world order fails to perform in accord with widespread societal moral expectations.
We regarded the actions of the ICJ as a validation of the distinctively legal dimension of the perspective adopted by the International Gaza Tribunal, which we also believed should not be even identified as an exclusively Palestinian initiative. We wanted the IGT to be seen and to act as a transnational initiative of individuals and groups throughout the world that were motivated by their global conscience as animated to act in response by universally shared values. In this central sense it was essential that IGT retain its autonomy as an entity transmitting the voices of conscience and principles of justice much more than being content to be a subsidiary vehicle for the deliberations and analysis of strictly legal interpretations of Israel’s conduct, which was beyond the orbit of its formal attributes.
We attempted with some success to make clear that IGT was a very different institutional framework than that associated with traditional judicial undertakings tied directly or indirectly to the post-Westphalian international system. IGT is a tribunal that is formed by and appeals directly to civil society for its novel means of ‘enforcement’ and hopes that by stimulating societal activism it will augment pressures on governments and the United Nations to enforce international law. This goal includes challenging the propriety of complicity on the part of the Western liberal democracies who were providing indispensable military, financial, and diplomatic support to Israel despite the genocidal character of its violence as openly and vividly enunciated, and virtually acknowledged, by Israel’s leaders immediately after October 7, including Prime Minister Netanyahu and now former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, among others. IGT also seeks to encourage activists throughout the world to mobilize solidarity initiatives sensitive to time, place, and a just and durable peace for the Palestinian people. To be sure, in inter-governmental settings, such as the UN, Netanyahu portrays Israel as the victim of genocide rather than its perpetrator, and in this manner of declaring itself a victim rather than a perpetrator, Israel sought to discredit the ICJ by its limited responsiveness to allegations of violations of the Genocide Convention as set forth in the South African submissions with supplemental support from other governments, almost all in the Global South.
The IGT recognized that it lacked the strictly legal authority or institutional prestige of the International Court of Justice, but we also believe that IGT had important advantages over traditional modes of judicial inquiry even when functioning at their best, which are rarely acknowledged. This affirmation of the ICJ law-declaring role agrees itsa judicial behavior is professionally competent and does not exhibit any kind of weakness as has been exhibited in other parts of the UN Systemic role in discharging their prime function of interpreting international law as jurists, and not as subordinate agents of geopolitical actors performing as puppeteers.
We believe that it is helpful to recognize that the IGT, despite this lack of formal legal authority, has several advantages compared to traditional international tribunals. These advantages are particularly relevant to any appraisal of the Gaza genocide from legal or moral perspectives:
— first of all, IGT is much quicker than the ICJ in reaching conclusions and making recommendations. The IGT rendered its judgment within a single year after the completion of its organizational framework. The world continues to wait for a final decision from the ICJ, although its jurisdiction to pronounce on South Africa’s contention that Israel’s violence in Gaza violated the Genocide Convention was accepted in December 2024.
In other words, the wheels of formal legal institutions turn too slowly to be of much practical and direct help to a people victimized by genocide even if, as was not the case here, that its judgments when finally rendered, were then promptly and effectively enforced. Such a judgment by a judicial institution is still important for the development of international law and for pedagogy exhibiting a less politicized approach to such contested behavior than during the unfolding of the events themselves when nationalist media and state propaganda tended to dominate public discourse even in countries where freedom of dissent and expression are respected;
–a second advantage of the IGT is the scope of what can be legitimately considered by the two types of tribunals. A formal court operates in accorded with a limited jurisdictional mandate set by the character of the submissions associated with a legal dispute that allows it to go forward at the ICJ. A traditional judicial structure generally relies on technical rules and procedures to minimize its encroachment on politicized issues that seek to clarify the particular features of the genocide. The main job of the ICJ is to decide whether or not Israel was rightly or wrongly accused of genocide. A peoples’ tribunal is unlimited in the discretion of its organizers to set the limits on the scope of inquiry and is openly politicized from its origins.
IGT’s basic commitment was to consider truthfully, wisely, and courageously all aspects of what is broadly conceived as genocide rather than confine judicial inquiry to a precisely defined conception associated with a submission specifically linked to one or more provisions of the Convention to Prevent and Punish Genocide, an international treaty negotiated and adopted at a UN venue. There exists an inevitable ambiguity between the South African conception of genocide as a specific crime, the crime of crimes as set forth in the Genocide Convention as drafted and adopted after World War II in 1948 following the definitional innovation of the word ‘genocide’ by Rafael Lemkin, and the IGT conception that is broader and more flexible. The Nuremberg Judgment avoided making any reference to ‘genocide’ in its approach to Nazi criminality, presumably because of its avoidance of retroactive or ex post facto lawmaking, although genocidal behavior had a long history prior to the Holocaust, that is, before the descriptive word existed. In contrast to the ICJ the IGT conceived of genocide as patterns of historical behavior that occurred long before the legal treaty entered into force, familiarly illustrated by the treatment of native peoples in a variety of colonizing settings. The experience of the Armenian minority in Turkey during World War I, and, of course, the Holocaust as the climax of Nazi extreme antisemitism are leading examples of ‘genocide’ before genocide, that is, before the Genocide Convention entered into force.
–a third and perhaps most crucial institutional advantage arose from the IGT presuming the guilt of Israel in relation to allegations of genocide, which relieved a peoples’ tribunal of the arduous task of providing adequate opportunities for the accused government to defend itself against such allegations. Avoiding the artificiality of a focus on whether or not Israel was guilty as charged avoided the distracting influence of a traditional court’s central task of affirming or rejecting genocidal allegations. It needs to be appreciated that a peoples’ tribunal never undertakes the hard work of fundraising and organization unless it is convinced both that the guilt of the accused party is overwhelmingly confirmed by the evidence and of the inability of the system of world public order, including the UN, to take meaningful action to condemn, prevent, and punish acts deeply objectionable to the conscience of morally inclined persons and politically motivated activists. As a result, rather than inquiring as to guilt or innocence, which as argued is the presupposed motive of the undertaking in cases involving severe international crimes, the IGT was able to focus on the elements of genocide, and to rest its judgment on the moral and justice implications of the genocidal policies of Israel and recommendations as to proper remedial responses. As such, IGT mission is dramatically different from that of a judicial procedure based on the Universal Jurisdiction of national courts or the Statute of the ICJ.
I am trying highlight the flexibility of the IGT that was brought into existence to give urgent attention to every aspect of the genocidal assault on Gaza that seems to affect notions not only of law but of justice and elementary morality, as well as the destructive effects of a humanitarian emergency. Its performance should be tested by whether its portrayal of the broader landscape of genocide was instructive and motivating, not by whether its pronouncement had much bearing on the narrower ICJ challenge of deciding whether Israel should be exonerated or not of legally framed charges of genocide.
With these considerations in mind, the conclusions reached by the IGT were rendered not by ordinary citizens guided by a presiding judge in a typical jury trial, but by a group of expert informed observers whose belief as to Israel’s legal accountability for genocide were foreknown and acted as qualifications for service rather than being seen as disqualifying signs of bias. In contrast, the ICJ had no need of any kind of jury as its positivistic task was confined to serving as interpreters of the applicable law, nothing more or less. It is fundamental to draw this distinction between traditional judicial inquiry limited to existing legal constraints and a tribunal primarily guided by the dictates of global conscience.
This background enabled the IGT to express outrage with respect to the policies pursued by Israel but also by the several complicit states that acted as an allies of Israel by providing material, diplomatic, and intelligence sharing support. The testimonies and findings of the IGT Jury of Conscience acted as an essential corrective to the way in which Israel and the Euro North American alliance were justifying their support for Israel as an expression of its right of self-defense and military necessity in the course of a war.
The importance of the IGT approach was fortified by recent disclosures challenging earlier decontextualizing accounts of October 7 in a variety of incriminating ways. It has become increasingly apparent that the Israeli government at the highest level received multiple concrete warnings of an impending Hamas attack from highly reliable sources and ignored these warnings internally. Netanyahu has even been recently accused by Israeli security officials of not reporting these reports to responsible Israeli military and intelligence officials, reinforcing suspicions that Israel sought a pretext for its genocidal retaliation.
In other words, the context of October 7th should be subjected to an impartial international investigation to determine whether Israel’s retaliation was made to seem a reasonable response to a prior Palestinian armed attack. If current suspicions are validated it would offer a further indication that the IGT inclusion of pre-October 7 Israel abusive occupation needed exposure. resistance by the people of Gaza. The fact that the West overwhelming uncritically treated the attack as completely unprovoked terrorism causing havoc and death in Israel rather than giving any attention to the Palestinian contention that the happenings of October 7th were overdue expression of resistance by a captive population.
I believe those involved with the IGT are proud of their contributions to its performance. The IGT proceedings are destined to become a historical document and archive that offers an objective picture and a comprehensive understanding of the main various dimensions of the Gaza genocide. A traditional court is professionally restricted in what it can and cannot do, and its findings when eventually made public by a final judgment. The decision will be long respectfully studied in international law classes, which will likely be beneficial, even if accompanied by the recognition that the ICJ is helpless when it comes to enforcement, or in addressing such matters as complicity, accountability, and reparations. My view is that the ICJ and IGT are parallel initiatives with each deserving study and respect.
The operations of IGT has also partially compensated for the broken promise of the architects of the post-1945 global public order that governments and their leaders would be hereafter held individually accountable for breaches of international criminal law by the operations of the International Criminal Court. It was intended to overcome the impressions left by the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials that only the policies and practices of the losers in the war would be legally scrutinized, while the crimes of the winners were allowed to go into history books as gigantic instances of impunity.
We are not done with the work of IGT which completed its formal work October 2025 at the end of Istanbul session, which has most unfortunately did not coincide with an end of the genocide. The new one-sided ceasefire phase of genocide that started on October 10, 2025 has prolonged the genocidal ordeal. The revised Israeli political agenda of genocide appears to have as its strategic objective the coerced permanent displacement of a large percentage of the surviving Gazan population, what amounts to a second Nakba or an intensified renewal of an ethnic cleansing campaign now extended from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel enjoys a somewhat free hand by the distractions of and preoccupations with the Iran War and with Israel’s regional warmongering.
The public attention given to Gaza in this period has been dominated by the perverse Trump diplomacy that rewards the perpetrator of genocide and punishes the victim, the Palestinians being even excluded from any role in shaping the future of their own homeland, including in relation to its contemplated reconstruction.
This further perversion of justice has been symbolically underwritten by the shocking behavior of the UN which in Security Council Resolution unanimously adopted in November 2025 that affirmed undivided UN support the Trump so-called peace plan even though it had this underlying orientation of allowing the perpetrators and enablers of genocide to escape accountability but given the an unbelievable mandate to shape the future of Gaza.
The Palestinians, of course, are not confused about these distortions of Trump diplomacy in the way that governments and the UN have been enticed into backing this diplomatic travesty.
The reputation of the UN is further blackened and by the support for the Trump Gaza plan, that has been articulated on several occasions by the current Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. Although condemnation would be appropriate, even silence given the weakness of the UN could be sympathetically appreciated.
So, we have now a situation that again challenges civil society to clarify the moral and legal realities arising from the gradual loss of leverage experienced by proponents of the Trump diplomacy as combined with the unlivable conditions in Gaza being reinforced by continuous violations of the cease-fire that was supposedly the starting point of a genuine peace process. Let me conclude by saying that the International Gaza Tribunal has done and is doing what it can to disseminate the results of its deliberations and findings and is currently preparing a book that will summarize this effort. To date the IGT has received very encouraging feedback from a variety of sources all over the world.
We who seek justice for the diverse peoples inhabiting the planet and are anguished by the suffering and devastation that genocide has produced in Gaza must not relax our vigilance at this time.
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