On Wednesday 14 May 2025 the BBC’s R4 late afternoon radio news and current affairs programme PM took the unique step of beginning its main broadcast with the full recorded version of a senior UN diplomat’s testimony to the Security Council on the appalling humanitarian disaster that Israel is wreaking on Gaza. The diplomat is…
The June-July 2024 report of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, primarily on Gaza and Southern Israel but also including the West Bank and East Jerusalem, finds that on 7 Oct last year, Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, committed war crimes, including abuses of International Human Rights Law…
26 March 2024 Andrew Whitley, Chair of the Balfour Project The Balfour Project warmly welcomes UN Security Council resolution 2728 demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the lifting of all restrictions on the urgent provision of humanitarian aid, at scale, to a population of 2.3 million. Starvation must never be used as a weapon…
by British Ambassador Barbara Woodward, at the UN Security Council meeting on Gaza on 29 Dec 2023. President, let me start with the humanitarian crisis. The 21 Dec IPC [Infection Prevention and Control] report records that more people are in ‘phase five’ famine in Gaza than in the rest of the world combined. Yesterday,…
UN leaders speak reason in the midst of madness By Andrew Whitley, Balfour Project Chair of Trustees In the midst of so much madness, misrepresentation and moral equivocation, it can be hard to find voices of sanity and reason. One voice we recommend is that of the United Nations. Secretary-General, Antόnio Guterres. We commend the…
The first comprehensive examination of UN efforts to protect Palestinian human rights in the territories occupied by Israel more than 50 years ago.
John McHugo, Balfour Project Trustee, international law expert and Middle East historian writes: The International Court of Justice is the judicial organ of the United Nations. In December 2022 it was requested by the UN General Assembly to clarify “the legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory…
By Michael Lynk In his eloquent 2012 memoir, Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, wrote that the failure of the U.N. to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East was a deep internal wound as old as the organisation itself. In his words, it has been “a painful and festering sore…