https://madrid.hostmaster.org/articles/unga_votes_to_recognize_palestine/en.html
The United Nations General Assembly has once again thundered with the voice of near-unanimity. In September 2025, state after state raised its hand in support of the New York Declaration, calling for a two-state solution and recommending Palestine be granted full membership in the UN. The chamber roared with applause. The symbolism was heavy: after decades of dispossession and failed peace processes, the world seemed to finally affirm Palestine’s right to exist as a sovereign state.
And yet, as the ink dried on the resolution in New York, fire rained down on Gaza City. Israel’s answer to recognition was annihilation.
The vote was historic. Over 140 countries backed it. Only a tiny handful - led by Israel, the United States, and their usual satellites - dared to oppose. For Palestinians, it was a moment of long-delayed acknowledgement: yes, you exist, and yes, you deserve a state of your own.
But recognition on paper means little if the people, land, and institutions of that state are being obliterated in real time. Gaza is not merely under siege; it is being systematically erased. Entire neighborhoods are gone. Hospitals are smoking ruins. Universities, schools, mosques, and churches flattened. Power, water, and sanitation destroyed. Famine grips the children who have survived the bombs. The Gaza Strip no longer resembles a society - it resembles the aftermath of an apocalypse.
Israel’s strategy could not be clearer: if Palestine cannot be denied in the halls of diplomacy, then it will be denied on the ground.
Since October 2023, Gaza has endured one of the most destructive military campaigns in modern history. The sheer tonnage of explosives dropped on this sliver of land defies comparison - more than many European cities absorbed during entire years of World War II. Except unlike Warsaw or London, Gaza’s people have nowhere to flee. Every border is sealed. It is a cage being hammered from above.
The official death toll - tens of thousands confirmed - already dwarfs the capacity of morgues and cemeteries. But everyone knows the real figure is vastly higher. Entire families vanish under rubble never excavated. Infants starve before they can even be registered as alive. Diseases sweep through camps where medicine no longer exists. This is extermination by every available means: bombs, hunger, thirst, disease.
While Gaza is pulverized, the West Bank is suffocated. Mass arrest campaigns sweep through cities like Tulkarem, Jenin, Hebron. Hundreds at a time are rounded up - cuffed, blindfolded, and herded into military prisons where torture, rape, and starvation are routine. Settler militias, emboldened and often escorted by soldiers, drive Palestinian families from their homes. Villages are razed. Farmland is stolen. New settlements rise like teeth sunk deeper into occupied soil.
This is not “security.” This is ethnic cleansing - calculated, deliberate, and unrelenting. It is the methodical breaking of Palestinian society to ensure that any “future state” is an amputated corpse.
Every time the world edges toward recognizing Palestine, Israel escalates its campaign of destruction. The September 2025 vote was no different. As diplomats applauded a resolution in New York, bombs fell harder on Gaza City. As leaders spoke of “two states side by side,” soldiers in the West Bank bound and disappeared Palestinian men by the hundreds. The message was unmistakable: resolutions change nothing, because Israel will decide reality with brute force.
Israel is not merely ignoring international law - it is mocking it. It scoffs at ICJ rulings. It shreds UN resolutions. It carries on with impunity, confident its Western patrons will shield it from consequences. This is the textbook definition of a rogue state, one that behaves as though above all rules, accountable to none.
And why shouldn’t it? For decades, condemnations have come without consequences. “Grave concern” and “deep regret” have been the only weapons the so-called international community has mustered. Israel has learned that it can act with total impunity, because no one will stop it.
The latest UNGA resolution is a diplomatic gesture, but gestures do not stop genocide. They do not open border crossings. They do not feed starving children. They do not rebuild bombed hospitals. Unless backed by force, resolutions are words floating over ashes.
If the world is serious about halting the destruction of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, then the time for platitudes has long passed. The General Assembly must act under Resolution 377 - “Uniting for Peace.” When the Security Council is paralyzed, the Assembly has the authority to recommend collective measures, including military intervention. This is not optional. It is the very mechanism designed to stop exactly what we are witnessing.
If the UN contents itself with symbolic votes while Israel continues its rampage, it will prove itself as toothless as the League of Nations in the face of fascism and the Holocaust. Another genocide will have unfolded under the gaze of an institution founded to prevent such crimes.
The choice could not be starker: either the UN intervenes to stop the obliteration of Palestine, or it consigns itself to irrelevance. Recognition means nothing if the recognized are annihilated. The vote in New York was historic, but history will not remember gestures. It will remember whether the world acted - or whether it turned away.