The International People’s Tribunal on Palestine convened on November 22 and 23 in Barcelona. The event brought together organizers, human rights advocates, and legal experts and offered a platform for survivors of the ongoing assault on Gaza to present evidence of Israel’s international crimes. After two days of testimony, jurors returned their verdict: Israel, the United States, and other Western powers are guilty of the crimes of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinian people.
“The mass killings, deliberate starvation, systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, environmental devastation, and the targeting of hospitals, shelters, schools, and places of refuge were carried out as a matter of state policy, and with full knowledge of their fatal consequences,” said head juror Ceren Uysal, reading from the verdict as the tribunal closed.
Hosted by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, International People’s Front, and People’s Coalition of Food Sovereignty (PCFS), the tribunal offered a quasi-judicial platform for advocates and survivors of Israel’s ongoing genocide to present evidence and legal arguments related to the crimes committed against the Palestinian people. It follows in a tradition of popular forums seeking justice and accountability where institutions have failed to provide it, including previous tribunals on recent crimes in Gaza.
It came as Israel continues to commit violence in Palestine. Israel has violated the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in effect since October 10, 2025, at least 497 times, killing more than 340 people, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. On November 17, the United Nations Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s plan for an international force that he will lead to oversee the continued occupation of Gaza, drawing condemnation from legal experts and rights groups, who argue the plan violates Palestine’s right to self-determination and will fail to protect Palestinians.
Against this backdrop, the International People’s Tribunal repudiated the status quo. It offered striking evidence for Israel’s guilt, particularly for the forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the undermining of their food security. “The strategy of using food as a weapon has been going on for a long time in Palestine and Lebanon, but now it is intensified,” Razan Zuayter, PCFS global co-chairperson, told Mondoweiss. Zuayter also chairs the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), which endorsed the tribunal.
Over the course of the two-day event, more than a dozen witnesses made this case. Farmers testified that Israeli forces had razed their lands, uprooting trees, killing livestock, and blackening the soil. One witness, who testified anonymously for fear of reprisal, described an attack Israeli forces committed on their land in May 2024. “A group of bulldozers and tanks attacked our area and destroyed a set of chicken farms for meat and egg production,” they said. “The stench of death and foul odors spread throughout the place, forcing us to flee.”
Musheir El Farra wept on the stand on November 23, recounting Israeli attacks on his hometown of Khan Younis that killed more than 200 members of his extended family. El Farra, a human rights campaigner and documentarian, was working on his film Shanshula about Gaza’s fishing communities in the lead-up to October 7, 2023. Even before Israel launched its genocidal attack on the enclave, El Farra testified that over 1,000 attacks had been committed against the fishing communities since 2020. Since October 2023, he told Mondoweiss, “the infrastructure has been destroyed completely.” A fisher who testified anonymously told the court that more than 90% of Gaza’s fishing boats are too damaged to use: “Seven hundred boats now lie sunken in the harbor basin, destroyed by Israeli aircraft.”
Others spoke about the destruction of critical infrastructure, including irrigation systems, food processing facilities, and food storage facilities. “Food production at scale is not possible,” Omar Nashabe, a scholar of international human rights law who testified as an expert, told the court. “It comes as over 500,000 people in Gaza are facing famine conditions.” The United Nations-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification found in August 2025 that over half a million people in Gaza were facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, and death. Another 1.07 million people, more than half of the enclave’s population, were on the brink.
“The children born in Gaza now don’t know what an apple looks like; they’ve never tasted a banana,” said Diana Nazzal, a surgeon who testified to the long-lasting harms of malnutrition and the depth of the hunger in Gaza based on a January 2024 medical mission to the enclave. Nazzal showed the court images of the baby formula that Israeli police confiscated from a colleague’s suitcase before the medical mission was allowed to enter Gaza, as well as food prices behind the separation walls. A kilogram of tomatoes cost $190 in North Gaza, while flour reached upwards of $1,150 per kilogram when Nazzal was there.
The complete devastation of Gaz’s agricultural land, livestock, farming and fishing equipment, and irrigation, food processing, and storage infrastructure means that not only are its people starving now, but the work required to rebuild its agriculture and food sectors is unprecedented in scale. During her opening remarks at the tribunal, Zuayter said that these attacks aimed not only to kill in the present, “but to kill in the future: to sterilize soil, poison water, and prohibit even a single seed from entering Gaza.”
Still, efforts to green Gaza after years of Israeli bombardment are already underway. Through its Revive Gaza’s Farmland project, APN has helped local farmers plant 30,000 fruit-bearing trees and sow and harvest almost 7 million kilograms of vegetables. “We work under the slogan ‘They uproot one tree, we plant ten,’” Zuayter told Mondoweiss.
Organizers at the International People’s Tribunal said they hope the tribunal’s findings will be used as a tool to pressure governments and mobilize further popular support for Palestine’s right to self-determination and for Palestinian-led efforts to rebuild and remain in Gaza.
In her final remarks as the tribunal closed on November 23, Uysal called on states, institutions, and all people of conscience to “support the Palestinian people in their efforts to restore, rehabilitate and reconstruct their territory and natural resources.”
Amnesty International comes to similar conclusions:
More than a month after a ceasefire was announced and all living Israeli hostages were released, Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signalling any change in their intent, said Amnesty International today…. while Israeli authorities and forces have reduced the scale of their attacks and allowed limited amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International….At least 327 people, including 136 children, have been killed in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire was announced on 9 October. Israel continues to restrict access to critical aid and relief supplies, including medical supplies and equipment necessary to repair life-sustaining infrastructure, violating multiple orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for Israel to ensure that Palestinians have access to humanitarian supplies
Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues unabated despite ceasefire – Amnesty International
I’ve always said Israel’s allies and arms suppliers were part of a joint criminal enterprise that violated the Rome Statute by actions in the Territory of Palestine.
Donald Trump has a written Mandate he obtained from the Security Council which requires his Peace Board to govern the territory of Gaza according to the principles of international law. He also must superintend the international peacekeeping force in accordance with international law. That means the ICC can issue indictments against him in his personal capacity for crimes he commits on the territory of Palestine, without regard to whether the USA is a party to the Rome Statute. See for example the ICC arrest warrants for the Myanmar Commander-in-Chief for crimes committed against Rohingya, because elements of the offense of illegal deportation across an international boundary occurred in the Territory of Bangladesh, an ICC state party.
It would also be hard for the ICC not to notice Trump and others have conspired to illegally deport and imprison citizens from ICC member states, like Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK to Gitmo, and they are unable or unwilling to act. Now he has started arresting, and deporting citizens of Mexico and other ICC member states, without any due process, based upon the 1790 “alien enemies act”. We have subsequently concluded Article X of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 1848 which guaranteed the rights of citizens of Mexico and their heirs of any nationality to remain in this country forever, without becoming US citizens, yet still enjoying the same rights as US citizens. Since that is the same treaty that stipulates where the border is located, why don’t our officials have to obey all of its provisions? Likewise the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949 prohibit cross border deportation of the civilian population.