Urgent Next Steps for Palestine at the UN: Time to Invoke ‘Uniting for Peace’

By Nicolas J. S. Davies

Colombian President Gustavo Petro. (Photo: via UN website)

Estimated reading time: 7 min 30 sec

The UN and world governments must urgently call up an Emergency Special Session under the title “Uniting for Peace” to vote for the official recognition of Palestine and other actions to isolate Israel.

As US President Donald Trump surely intended, his “20-point Gaza plan” succeeded in upstaging calls by many other world leaders at the UN General Assembly for concrete, coordinated UN-led measures to force Israel to end its criminal genocide in Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine.

Trump’s White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on September 29 coincided with the last day of the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, where Trump had met with eight Arab and Muslim leaders at the UN and won their support for a proposed plan for Gaza. In a textbook bait-and-switch, Trump then allowed the Israelis to significantly alter his plan before he unveiled it to the world at his meeting with Netanyahu, but pretended it was the same plan that the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and other countries had endorsed.

Trump’s plan is based on cornering Hamas into a series of steps it has not agreed to: freeing all the Israeli prisoners in Gaza without a full Israeli withdrawal; surrendering its weapons and its role in Palestinian politics and handing Gaza over to a new phase of Israeli occupation. Gaza would be governed by a “board” headed by Trump and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who not only invaded Iraq alongside the US in 2003 but, at the same time, masterminded a dirty war against Hamas that led to the isolation and blockade of Gaza and, ultimately, to the current crisis.

Under Trump’s plan, Israel would agree to end its genocidal assault on Gaza and partially withdraw its forces, but nothing in his plan would prevent it from re-launching the genocide once the Israeli prisoners in Gaza were safely back in Israel. It would also retain control of Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt, allowing it to keep restricting the entry of food, medicine and rebuilding materials.

In response to Trump’s proposal, Hamas agreed to release all its Israeli prisoners in return for an Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners, but only after a permanent Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu said publicly that Israel will not withdraw its forces from Gaza until Hamas and other Palestinian forces have been removed from power and disarmed, while Hamas insists it will not disarm until the occupation of Palestine ends and its fighters can hand over their weapons to the new armed forces of the sovereign nation of Palestine.

Hamas also responded that it has no authority to act as the sole negotiator in talks on the future of Palestine. It said Palestine must be governed by Palestinians, not Trump or Blair, and that its future must be negotiated between representatives of all Palestinian factions.

So Trump’s plan is rife with conditions that one side or the other will not agree to, and it seems unlikely to end the genocide. However, in any case, it is clearly designed to perpetuate, not to end, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. As the Progressive International said in a statement on October 7:

“Far from paving a path to peace, it offers a blueprint for the further colonization and subjugation of the Palestinian people – the culmination of decades of dispossession and destruction that reached its dark zenith in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

The current negotiations may collapse quickly or drag on for weeks or months, but the UN and the world’s governments should not sit idly by as passive observers. The UN should urgently prepare to take the concrete steps that leaders from around the world called for at the General Assembly in September, to give force to UN General Assembly resolutions calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the unrestricted restoration of life-saving humanitarian aid, and a final end to the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine.

In July 2025, the UN General Assembly organized a “High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.” The Conference was chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, and its goal was “not only to reaffirm international consensus on the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine but to catalyze concrete, time-bound and coordinated international action toward the implementation of the two-State solution.”

The Conference produced a lengthy “New York Declaration,” which was endorsed by the General Assembly in a resolution on September 12, by a vote of 142 to 10, with 12 abstentions.

However, this was a plan for the “day after,” which, by itself, failed to bring that day any closer, because it deliberately avoided taking the “concrete, time-bound and coordinated international action” that the Conference’s mandate had explicitly called for.

The declaration was based on the deliberations of 8 working groups, co-chaired by representatives of 15 different countries, the Arab League and the European Union, which each drew up plans for the aftermath of a hypothetical permanent ceasefire in Gaza, with topics like “Humanitarian Action and Reconstruction” and “Security for Israelis and Palestinians.”

Three round-tables at the July conference, chaired by former Irish President, Mary Robinson, former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid bin Ra’ad of Jordan, agreed that the General Assembly’s first step should be the international recognition of the State of Palestine.

UN recognition requires the approval of both the General Assembly and the UN Security Council. However, with such a large majority of countries supporting recognition, and the United States abusing its veto to sideline the Security Council, the General Assembly can call an Emergency Special Session (ESS) to act alone under the “Uniting for Peace” principle, to officially recognize Palestine and welcome it as a full UN member.

Instead, while several Western countries finally recognized Palestine, bringing the total number that has recognized its independent statehood to 157, the declaration was endorsed in a regular session of the General Assembly that lacked the power to grant formal UN recognition.

However, the most serious omission from the July 2025 Conference and the September 12 resolution was that they failed to take concrete, coordinated UN action to impose a ceasefire in Gaza, the vital first step to get to the “day after” that the working groups at the conference were tasked with planning for. Trump took advantage of that omission to propose an end to the genocide in Gaza on terms that would perpetuate the Israeli occupation instead of ending it.

It was entirely predictable that Israel would reject and ignore the New York Declaration, and Prime Minister Netanyahu did just that in his General Assembly speech on September 26. After most of the delegates walked out and left Netanyahu ranting to a nearly empty hall, the Hague Group of countries, led by Colombia and South Africa, hosted a meeting with representatives of 34 countries to plan the coordinated, concrete action the UN must now take to end the genocide and the occupation.

As Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodriguez Parilla, told the General Assembly in his speech the next day, it should convene an Emergency Special Session “without further delay” to take concrete measures for Palestine, including a binding resolution on full UN membership.

If the General Assembly is serious about ending the genocide and the occupation, the Emergency Special Session must also debate and vote on an UN-led arms embargo, economic boycott and other concrete measures designed to force Israel to comply with international law, international court rulings and UN resolutions on Palestine.

The UN Human Rights Office in Geneva already has a database of 158 Israeli and multinational corporations that are complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation, so an international boycott of those companies could take effect immediately.

Israel is a small country, dependent on trade and economic relations with countries all over the world. If the large majority of countries that voted for the New York Declaration are ready to back their words and their votes with coordinated action, a UN-led trade boycott, divestment campaign and arms embargo can put enormous pressure on Israel to end its genocide in Gaza and its illegal occupation of Palestine. With full participation by enough countries, these steps could quickly make Israel’s position untenable.

Many speakers at the 2025 General Assembly called passionately for this kind of decisive action to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza and end the occupation. King Abdullah of Jordan asked, “How long will we be satisfied with condemnation after condemnation without concrete action?”

President Lula said that Brazil already has an arms embargo against Israel and has cut off all trade with its illegal settlements; Turkiye severed all trade links with Israel in August; Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof called for an arms embargo and the suspension of the EU’s trade agreement with Israel and Chadian Prime Minister, Allah-Maye Halina, declared, “Our duty from this moment on is to transform this strong declaration into concrete acts and make the Palestinian people’s hope a reality.”

The Hague Group of countries was formed by the Progressive International to support South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice and war crimes cases against Israeli officials at the International Criminal Court. In a meeting at Bogota in Colombia in July, twelve of those countries committed to an arms embargo and other concrete measures against the Israeli occupation. In his speech to the General Assembly on September 23, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called for an Emergency Special Session on Palestine and for a UN peacekeeping force to “defend Palestine.”

A previous Emergency Special Session in September 2024 demanded that Israel must end its post-1967 occupation of Palestine within a year. Israel’s refusal to even begin to do so and its defiant escalation of its genocide in Gaza, increasing repression in the other occupied territories and attacks on other countries provide all the grounds the General Assembly should need to take the concrete, coordinated measures that many countries are calling for.

Tragically, instead of applying the diplomatic and economic pressure it will take to secure a ceasefire and end the occupation, France, Saudi Arabia and their partners, instead, relied on dangling carrots in front of Israel, such as regional economic integration and recognition by Arab and Muslim countries, to try to seduce or bribe Israel into complying with international law and UN resolutions.

This was never going to work. The toothless New York Declaration, and now Trump’s new occupation plan for Gaza, have wasted irreplaceable, precious lost time for the besieged, starved, bombed people of Gaza, as more of them are killed, maimed and starved to death every day. The UN General Assembly must follow up on these flawed initiatives with decisive UN-led action to actually end the genocide and the occupation, by imposing economic sanctions, an arms embargo and other measures to diplomatically and economically isolate Israel.

There is nothing to prevent the UN General Assembly from quickly convening a new meeting of its Emergency Special Session (ESS) on Palestine. The ESS can finally take the “concrete, time-bound, coordinated international action” that the French- and Saudi-led initiative promised but failed to deliver – what Malaysian Foreign Minister, Mohamad Hasan, described to the General Assembly as “concrete action against the occupying force.”

Across the world, ordinary people are rising up to demand that their governments take action, while flotillas of activists set sail to breach the blockade of Gaza that their governments have failed to challenge.

The Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly, meeting under the Uniting for Peace principle, can debate and pass binding resolutions on UN recognition of Palestine, a UN-led international arms embargo, economic boycott and disinvestment campaign, war crimes prosecutions, and other measures to diplomatically isolate Israel.

By responding to calls of conscience from their own people, voting for these measures at the UN and acting quickly to enforce them, the governments of the world have the collective power to end this genocide and the brutal, illegal occupation of Palestine that it is part of. Now, they must use it.

– Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, and, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, with an updated and expanded edition due in March 2025.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.