As a result of Israel’s deliberate starving of the civilians in Gaza and further war crimes and crimes against humanity, Science4Peace now calls to stop any cooperation with scientific institutions and international corporations involved in Israel’s wars. Its recent declaration (see below) makes this point unmistakably clear and demands the immediate end to the war against Gaza and the end of Gaza’s siege to allow the transport of all urgently necessary live-saving means into the enclave.
Monday, 4. August 2025 07:00
We have been silent for too long! We can no longer close our eyes on what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The government and the army of Israel are waging a horrific war against the population of Gaza, bombing hospitals, killing people waiting for food delivery, using starvation as weapons and now attacking staff residence and main warehouse of the WHO in Gaza.
The population in West Bank and East Jerusalem is facing brutal attacks from right-wing settlers, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is not protecting and even sometime participating in the attacks.
The government of Israel is permanently violating international laws, there is an arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) – all states who signed the Rome Statute are obliged to execute such warrants, including countries like Germany and Italy. Orders from the International Court of Justice from Jan 2024 and May 2024 must be respected. We see it as a positive move, that 30 European and international partners have launched an urgent demand to end this war, while it is a shame, that countries like Germany are not among the signees.
The red line has been crossed – immediate actions are required.
The Science4Peace Forum was founded to promote international scientific civilian and non-military exchange across all borders. We have protested strongly against exclusion of Russian and Belorussian scientists from international cooperations as a reaction to the war against Ukraine, which we strongly condemn. We insisted that the cooperation in non-military, civilian areas must continue, in respect to international rules. However, if institutes are directly involved in the war, crimes against humanity and the violation of international law, the cooperation cannot continue as is.
- We urge to immediately stop the war against Gaza and West Bank, immediately lift the blockade of food delivery to Gaza and supply the population with all the necessary food and humanitarian aid by UN. We insist to stop all weapon deliveries to Israel.
- We insist that governments fulfill their obligations respecting international laws and that these laws are applied in all cooperations.
- We insist on a long-term solution and a recognition of a Palestinian state.
- We request that agreements with Israeli academic institutions and companies be subject to investigation regarding their direct involvement in the war against Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and call to halt cooperation with institutions, programs and individuals who are directly involved in the wars. Scientific cooperation can only continue on the base of respect of international law and in a non-military field – civil clauses must be applied to avoid any complicity in crimes against humanity or against the Geneva Conventions.
- We leverage our international contacts, including those with our Israeli colleagues, to build a unified and international protest action against the war on Gaza and the continuing assaults on and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian communities. We fully support protests from inside the Israeli academia against the inhuman and criminal, nationalistic behavior of the Israeli government and Israeli army.
- We, as Science4Peace Forum, call to support students and scientists from Palestine with special fellowship programs (short and longer-term support) in order to guarantee their and the Palestinian society’s future prospects.
Link to the declaration
Science4Peace is a Forum of particle physicists founded in March 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine (science4peace.com). Its main aim then was to maintain scientific cooperation in fields of civil research, in particular fundamental research. The years of the Cold War period had proven that scientific cooperation across system, state, and ideological boundaries is helpful to decrease tensions and to strengthen disarmament, diplomacy, and above all understanding between people. International scientific research institutions like CERN in Geneva and DESY were set up to achieve those goals and enable international joint research in large experiments. When DESY’s directorate, as a response to the Russian invasion, banned Russian and Belarussian scientists and even students from joint publications, conferences, summer schools, cooperation in the experiments, and other forms of cooperation and CERN followed suit in Summer 2024, the Science4Peace Forum published statements and articles against such a grave breach with a successful policy of international cooperation. It organized panels evaluating the impact of sanctions in the sciences, debating the need for strengthening Civil Clauses for preserving the exclusively civil nature of scientific research at CERN, DESY, and universities not linked to the military. Seminar series were organized about the dangers of nuclear wars, the history of the development of nuclear weapons, the inhumane destruction caused by the deployment of nuclear bombs by the US army against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fight for nuclear disarmament, and the responsibility of scientists.
The positions for peaceful research and cooperation across boundaries if no military research was involved motivated the Forum to discuss and organize panels about Israel’s response to the attack across the enclosure of Gaza in southern Israel in October 2023. The question of sanctions, which is at the center of Science4Peace, was raised time and again. The members of the Forum are firmly convinced that cooperating with scientists in all areas of civil and non-military research is necessary and useful, if we want to solve the major crises that threaten the earth and its inhabitants today. Hence, the Forum cooperates with scientists in the West Bank and from Gaza, as well as with Israeli academics who oppose their country’s wars, in particular the inhumane destructions of civil society and the systematic killing of the civilian population. The Forum crowdfunded the education of physics students in Nablus and organized international Zoom meetings with Palestinian physicists and Israeli academics. As a result of Israel’s deliberate starving of the civilians in Gaza and further war crimes and crimes against humanity, Science4Peace now calls to stop any cooperation with scientific institutions and international corporations involved in Israel’s wars.