Category: Columns

Yoliswa Dwane Lecture: the war on Palestinian children

“A nuclear power considers a sick baby to be a security concern.”

Israeli-born legal scholar Dr Noam Peleg gave this year’s Yoliswa Dwane Lecture on 6 May. The annual lecture is hosted by Equal Education and UCT’s Centre for Law and Society, in memory of activist and Equal Education co-founder Yoliswa Dwane who died of cancer in 2022. This is a lightly edited and slightly shortened transcript of the lecture.

End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts say States face defining choice

GENEVA – Escalating atrocities in Gaza present an urgent moral crossroads and States must act now to end the violence or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza – an outcome with irreversible consequences for our shared humanity and multilateral order, UN experts warned today, demanding immediate international intervention.

Israel’s New INGO Registration Measures Are a Grave Threat to Humanitarian Operations and International Law – 55 Organisations Say

The undersigned 55 organisations operating in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) call for urgent action from the international community against new Israeli registration rules for international NGOs. Based on vague, broad, politicised, and open-ended criteria, these rules appear designed to assert control over independent humanitarian, development and peacebuilding operations, silence advocacy grounded in international humanitarian and human rights law, and further entrench Israeli control and de facto annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory.

Statement on Gaza by Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

To the Israeli authorities, and those who can still reason with them, we say again: lift this brutal blockade. Let humanitarians save lives.

To the civilians left unprotected, no apology can suffice. But I am truly sorry that we are unable to move the international community to prevent this injustice. We won’t give up, even if the world has given you every reason to give up on us.