A UN Special Rapporteur has decried the resolution as a violation of Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
Marjorie Cohn || In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly committed the UN’s original sin when it partitioned Palestine to create Israel. This launched the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous people, and the establishment of a settler colonial state.
Now, 78 years later, the UN Security Council has committed the UN’s second cardinal sin. It enshrined Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, put its imprimatur on Israel’s genocide, and granted colonial control over the lives of the Palestinians to the United States, which has aided and abetted the genocide.
On November 17, 2025, the Council adopted Resolution 2803, by a vote of 13-0. Russia and China, both permanent members of the Security Council, could have vetoed it. But shamefully they abstained, ostensibly influenced by support for the resolution from several Arab and Muslim states, including Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan.
The resolution incorporates Donald Trump’s “peace plan.” It grants control over Gaza to the U.S.-led “Board of Peace” and it orders the deployment of a U.S.-led occupation force called “International Stabilization Force (ISF).” Trump will oversee both colonial bodies, in collaboration with Israel. Palestinians will not be allowed to participate in their own governance.
The Board of Peace is designed to function as a transitional administrator of Gaza. It will control all services and humanitarian aid, all ingress and egress into and out of Gaza, and will supervise the financing and reconstruction of Gaza. The resolution “underscores the importance” of humanitarian assistance but does not require the unimpeded provision of aid.
The US is punishing UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her scathing reports on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. By Marjorie Cohn , Truthout
July 14, 2025
The ISF will not be a peacekeeping force. Since the Council authorized it “to use all necessary measures to carry out its mandate,” the ISF will have the power to disarm Palestinian groups, as Israel insists. There is no provision in the resolution for disarming the Israel Occupation Forces, the body that has been conducting the genocide.
“A military force answering to a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by the President of the United States, an active party to this conflict that has continually provided military, economic and diplomatic support to the illegal occupying Power, is not legal,” said Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. “It is a brazen attempt to impose, by threat of continued force against a virtually defenseless population, U.S. and Israeli interests, plain and simple.”
“Essentially, it will leave Palestine in the hands of a puppet administration, assigning the United States, which shares complicity in the genocide, as the new manager of the open-air prison that Israel has already established,” Albanese added.
Since October 2023, Israel has killed nearly 70,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 170,000. Nearly everyone in Gaza has been displaced by Israel multiple times and Gaza has largely been reduced to rubble. Israel has violated the latest ceasefire at least 393 times and killed at least 312 Palestinians since it went into effect on October 10, 2025.
In three recent cases, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found a plausible case of genocide by Israel, that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful, and that Israel has illegally used starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Resolution Violates the Palestinian People’s Right to Self-Determination
The Security Council resolution violates fundamental tenets of international law including the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. “The ICJ was clear: self-determination is an inalienable right of the Palestinian people and the UN and all States have an obligation to assist in its realization,” Albanese said. “This can only begin with the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory. Replacing an abusive trustee with another is not self-determination, it is unlawful.”
Albanese was referring to the 2004 advisory opinion of the ICJ, which ruled that “the principle of self-determination of peoples has been enshrined in the United Nations Charter and reaffirmed by the General Assembly … pursuant to which ‘Every State has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peoples … of their right to self-determination.’”
The right to self-determination includes but isn’t limited to the right of peoples to control their own land and natural resources; the right to be free from demographic manipulations by any third party; and the right to determine their own political status, economic development, and future.
But the resolution says that only after undefined “reform” and “redevelopment” are determined sufficient by the colonial administration, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
Resolution 2803 “rewards the U.S., a co-perpetrator of genocide, with control over Gaza and its potentially lucrative reconstruction process, while simultaneously relieving the Israeli regime of all of its responsibilities as an illegally occupying force,” Yara Hawari wrote in Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian-led think tank. “Palestinian participation is expected to be tightly limited and heavily conditioned. Trump’s plan confines it to ‘technocratic’ and ‘apolitical’ roles, subject to continuous external supervision and effectively excluding any representatives with democratic legitimacy or political agency.”
Hamas and other Palestinian factions rejected the resolution. They wrote in a joint statement that ISF “will turn into a type of imposed guardianship or administration — reproducing a reality that restricts the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and to managing their own affairs.”
“Assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation,” Hamas said. “Any international force, if established, should only be present at the border to separate the forces and monitor the ceasefire, and it should be under full UN supervision and act solely in coordination with the Palestinian institutions, without the occupation having any role in this.”
Samir Al-Bakri, a resident of Gaza City, told Mondoweiss, “It is as if the mission of the international force coming to Gaza is to protect Israel’s borders from Palestinians without offering anything in return to us. And it won’t even offer us any real protection either; it won’t prevent Israel from carrying out its military operations or aerial bombardments of Gaza. It may even help Israel achieve its goals.”
Uniting for Peace
The UN Charter grants primary authority for the maintenance of international peace and security to the Security Council. Uniting for Peace (UFP) is a mechanism created in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 1950 to bypass the Soviet Union’s veto in the Council during the Korean War. It says that the “failure of the Security Council to discharge its responsibilities on behalf of all the Member States … does not relieve Member States of their obligations or the United Nations of its responsibility under the Charter to maintain international peace and security.”
In adopting Resolution 2803, the Security Council did not discharge its responsibilities under the Charter to act on behalf of Palestine, a permanent observer state, which is undergoing the first live-streamed genocide in history. Nor is the Council discharging its responsibility to maintain international peace and security by memorializing an illegal occupation and an ongoing genocide.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has declared that he will introduce a Uniting for Peace resolution in the UN General Assembly to establish a multinational protection force for Palestinians and levy sanctions and an arms blockade to end the genocide and liberate Palestine from the unlawful Israeli occupation.
In retaliation, the U.S. government has revoked Petro’s visa, imposed sanctions against him, raised punitive tariffs on Colombia, and threatened the use of military force against Colombia.
People opposed to the U.S.’s colonial takeover of Palestine can join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, lobby for arms embargoes, and support accountability for Israeli and U.S. leaders responsible for perpetrating the genocide.
We must do everything within our power to stop this atrocity and support the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination.
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