Remarks at the UN General Assembly High-Level Event “Call to Action for Palestinian Children in the West Bank and Gaza”

Mr. Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

New York, 24 September 2025

[As delivered]

Your Majesty, and Excellencies, Colleagues.  

The first voice we heard on that video, Mariam, was killed exactly one month ago today.

And, Yasmeen, Omar, we also hear you. We see you. We need you. And I hope to meet you in the light and not when you have to shield yourselves in the dark.

So, we gather, once again, to share our testimony and our shame.

To try to find words to convey the horror, and to fail again to do it justice. 

To repeat that something must be done. And, I fear, to accept that nothing will.  

Knowing that our words will not reach Mariam, the children under the bombs, those scraping through the rubble for food, enduring amputations without anesthetic, losing their last sparks of hope. 

Fearing that not a single word today will reach and resonate those who could stop this 21st century atrocity.  

Knowing that one day we will rightly be asked whether we did all that we could. 

In case it needs repeating, children everywhere should have water, food, safety, health, shelter, education.

And children in Gaza have as much right as children anywhere else.

But in Gaza, children are killed queuing for water.

In Gaza, children are starved even though the supplies and networks are at the borders.

In Gaza, a famine has been caused by cruelty, justified by revenge, enabled by indifference, sustained by complicity. 

In Gaza, as we heard, a child has been killed on average every hour for almost two years.

In Gaza, the lucky children sleep in tents. 

In Gaza, shelters are bombed, and schools have become sites of horror, depriving over 700,000 children of their right to education.

And yet, we are told again and again, that this is a price a population somehow has to pay for war. 

The lawyers and historians will argue long and hard what to call this.

And despite bans on international journalists, they will have immense amounts of evidence to consider.

Justice, accountability will be too late for those who are lost but must still be pursued – not only to honour Mariam and so many like her, but to uphold the principles that protect others moving forward.

Of course, suffering of children is not confined to Gaza.

In Israel, children were killed on 7 October 2023 and hostages, children among them, were taken from homes, families, friends. They must be released.       

In the West Bank, children are subjected to escalating levels of violence, including by settlers, as we heard. Killed, injured, detained, displaced. Enough. 

Over a year ago, the International Court of Justice required Israel to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian help. This – and all the other binding decisions – must be implemented without delay.

Because the rules of war were built over decades to protect civilians and ensure a basic minimum of humanity.

And it’s those rules that are being corroded here, day after day after day.

We’ve heard Israeli Ministers talk openly of flattening Gaza, forcing its people out permanently, annihilation, denying food aid. 

Let’s not bequeath children a lawless world stripped of dignity and hope.

We do not have to choose between condemning the starvation of children in Gaza and demanding the unconditional release of hostages.

We do not have to choose between fighting antisemitism and holding Israel to the same laws as everyone else.

We must join world leaders, including President Trump yesterday, in calling for a ceasefire. We must be given the humanitarian access to reach Gaza’s women, children and elderly who cannot eat statements of concern.

Because the children of Gaza are trapped in a graveyard. They’ve been bombed, maimed, starved, burned alive, buried in the rubble of their homes, separated from their parents. Denied every ounce of humanity that the rules of war were designed to preserve.

Killed while sleeping, playing, queuing for food and water, seeking medical care.

I fear that we will gather again, to solemnly intone the death toll, to try to find new words to express the horror, to call again for action. 

But how many more must die? And what further damage will we have done to our shared humanity?