Dozens of lawyers, academics, human rights advocates, and journalists from Palestine, Israel, and global civil society issued a call to conscience on May 29 from a gathering in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dubbed the Sarajevo Declaration, the 2,000-word document was the culmination of the three-day preliminary hearing of the Gaza Tribunal, a newly formed people’s justice initiative aiming to voice “collective moral outrage” over what it described as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the decades of impunity for atrocities leading to it.
Throughout three eight-hour days, the tribunal heard 45 back-to-back testimonies of research and analysis on the conditions of life and death in Gaza and across the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The entries — about obliteration of cultural heritage, violations of reproductive and disability rights, the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism, capital accumulation on Gaza’s rubble and in the West Bank, and otherwise — made a case beyond the charge of genocide, which members of the tribunal and a growing proportion of the global human rights community view as fact. Unbound by formal procedure and jurisdiction, tribunal members also brought in analysis of the context predating October 7, 2023. All together, they built an argument that the present stage of genocide in Palestine is the logical end point of a Zionism’s project of domination initiated before 1948 — and that the exceptions that have allowed it have also undermined international law, global cooperation and the United Nations system for all.
Israel and those enabling its actions “want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law,” said Raji Sourani, a Palestinian attorney from Gaza and founder and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City, in his address at the close of the tribunal’s first day. “Not for Gazans, not for Palestinians, but for the whole world.”
The semi-closed session on the hushed campus of the International University of Sarajevo was the Gaza Tribunal’s first meeting, with the final verdict planned for a last session in October. The proceedings — in their quasi-academic format of panels, PowerPoints, and papers — were both desperate in their desire to impede atrocities and self-conscious of the impossibility to meet the present horror: Israel’s military has intensified its aerial bombardment and blockade of Gaza, in addition to opening fire on people queued for food, leading to some of the deadliest days since Israel broke the last ceasefire in March.
Hellbound and Down 