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Under Item 3 of the UNHRC 55: BADIL calls on States to recognize Israel’s Domicide as a tool to Prevent the Palestinian Right to Return
Under Item 3 of the UNHRC 55: BADIL calls on States to recognize Israel’s Domicide as a tool to Prevent the Palestinian Right to Return

6/3/2024

On 5 March 2024, BADIL Resource Center delivered an oral statement under Item 3 of the United Nations Human Rights Council Regular Session 55 (UNHRC 55) within the Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur (SR) on the Right to Adequate Housing.

BADIL’s statement highlighted that the wanton and deliberate destruction of Palestinian villages, towns and cities, during the 1948 Nakba and the Israeli Genocide in the Gaza Strip, fit the SR’s elaboration of the concept of domicide, which he considers to be a unique international crime. In the case of the Palestinian people, Israel has been using domicide as a tool to deny Palestinian return, since the Nakba.    

With regards to the situation in the Gaza Strip, the SR stated that “All that makes housing ‘adequate’ – access to services, jobs, or culture – schools, religious places, universities, hospitals - have all been leveled. The scale and intensity of destruction is far worse than Aleppo, Mariupol or even Dresden and Rotterdam during WWII.”  

The mass destruction does not negate refugees and internally displaced persons right to return, property restitution and compensation (reparations), which remain obligations of the perpetrator. In the case of Palestine, the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime is the perpetrator and responsible for providing full reparations which must be implemented within a rights-based decolonization approach.

For the orated version, see here, at 1:07:05.