From beneath the rubble, life is born… and no mother who carries a homeland in her womb can be defeated
Ladies and gentlemen, free people of the world,
We address you today at a moment where tragedy intersects with silence, justice with impotence, and the human conscience with the test of truth. While the flames continue to consume what remains of Gaza, and the siege tightens around the very breath of life within it, a new chapter unfolds before us, one of the ongoing genocide committed by Israel against our Palestinian people, a chapter whose cruelty surpasses imagination: the killing of embryos and the targeting of life before it is even born.
Massacres alone do not capture the horror of the occupation; there is something deeper and far more appalling. In an interview with The Guardian, Navi Pillay, former head of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, revealed a shocking crime committed by the Israeli army in January 2023, when it targeted the “Al-Basma Fertility Clinic” in Gaza City, destroying in a single moment four thousand Palestinian embryos preserved in nitrogen tanks.
Pillay confirmed that the strike was not an error or an accidental act, but a deliberate attack aimed at preventing births among Palestinians, an attempt to erase a future generation before it is born. She pointed out that the Israeli army intentionally targeted the building that housed the embryos, in conduct that clearly falls under the definition of genocide: “preventing births within a national or ethnic group,” as stipulated in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
What Pillay described demonstrates that international humanitarian law, in all its provisions, applies precisely to what is happening in Gaza:
• The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits attacks on civilians and pregnant women, considering them protected persons.
• The 1977 Additional Protocol I grants special protection to pregnant women and children during armed conflicts.
• The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) classifies intentional killing, forced abortion, and preventing births within a national group as acts constituting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
Thus, the killing of embryos and the targeting of pregnant women is not merely a violation, it is a full-fledged war crime, and part of the broader genocidal policy practiced by Israel against Palestinians.
The World Health Organization confirms that more than 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza are living under catastrophic humanitarian conditions. One-third of these cases are classified as “high-risk pregnancies,” while around 130 babies are born every day, 27% by cesarean section and 20% prematurely.
But behind these numbers lie countless stories of pain:
– Women giving birth in shelters and under rubble, without anesthesia or medical tools,
– Mothers holding their newborns under bombardment or in the open,
– The occupation deliberately blocking the entry of supplies for cesarean deliveries, medicines, antibiotics, infant formula, and surgical sutures—turning childbirth into a battle for survival and making every Palestinian mother a witness to repeated death: once when she loses her unborn child, and again when she realizes the world sees her and does nothing.
The occupation has not only killed children in their mothers’ arms; it has gone further, targeting the very infrastructure of life itself: the mother’s womb, fertility laboratories, and maternity hospitals, sending a message with no ambiguity: the existence of Palestinians is rejected even before they are born. This is not a war against a resistance movement, it is a war against the very human possibility of Palestinian existence.
Before this scene, the world remains silent, while some states continue repeating the worn-out phrase: “Israel’s right to defend itself,” even as Gaza is annihilated, stone, human, and unborn child. This silence is no longer neutrality; it is explicit complicity in the crime, participation in prolonging the catastrophe, and a profound betrayal of the principles of justice and humanity upon which the United Nations itself was founded.
Despite the tragedy, Gaza remains a symbol of dignity and resilience. It resists the siege with steadfastness, death with hope, and from amid the rubble, stories are born that testify that this people cannot be defeated.
From its wounds, it draws its future; from its ashes, it forges its freedom, believing that freedom is not begged for but seized, and that justice will come no matter how long it takes.
We, in the Department of International Relations of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, call upon all the living forces of the world, parliaments, unions, parties, legal, human rights, and humanitarian institutions, to act to expose these crimes and hold their perpetrators accountable.
We believe that the free human conscience will not remain imprisoned by silence,
and that the global solidarity movement, which has begun to grow, will continue its path until the system of genocide and colonialism is dismantled.
It is a project designed to erase life, starting with the unborn child and not ending with the elderly or the young.
With every new moment of international silence, the crime of the occupation becomes more deeply rooted, adding a new shameful chapter in history under the banner of “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Gaza is bleeding, but it does not break.
And Palestine, intended to be buried beneath the rubble, will rise again from the ashes, as life always does.
And the flag of Palestine will be raised over its land, free and sovereign, untouched by occupier or colonizer.