The UN Security Council Declares War on Gaza by Norman G Finkelstein

A DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST GAZA United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025)

On 17 November 2025, the UN Security Council voted to hand Donald Trump the deed to Gaza

Below is the conclusion to Norman Finkelstein’s new book entitled GAZA’S GRAVEDIGGERS: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places, published by OR Books

On 17 November 2025, the UN Security Council passed, by 13 votes to zero with two abstentions, a milestone resolution imposing a ceasefire in Gaza and charting a path forward based on “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict.”¹ The resolution was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy. The Council and Gaza having been thrust into the antechamber of the state of nature, mutual relations between them reverted to being regulated by the laws of nature, whereby the Council members that “declared war . . . may be destroyed as a lion or a tyger, one of those wild savage beasts, with whom men can have no society nor security.”² The people of Gaza suffer no obligation to obey this grotesque resolution; on the contrary, the Council, by virtue of it, “becomes dangerous to mankind” and “every man upon this score, by the right he hath to preserve mankind in general, may restrain, or where it is necessary, destroy things noxious to them.”³ The Council didn’t just issue Gaza a death warrant; it also issued its own.

A UN resolution, even one just calling for an immediate ceasefire, is typically set off by a painstaking preamble “Recalling,” “Reaffirming,” “Emphasizing,” “Reiterating,” etc., the parameters and particularities of the relevant law defined by UN organs.⁴ This new resolution, which prescribed not only the terms of a ceasefire but also a roadmap for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict writ large, emerged ex nihilo, inscribed on a tabula rasa. According to entrenched law, ratified by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Gaza constituted, alongside the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, “Occupied Palestinian Territory”; “As an occupying Power, Israel must refrain from . . . imped[ing] the Palestinian people from exercising its right to self-determination, including its inalienable right to territorial integrity over the entirety of the Occupied Palestinian Territory”; “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal. . . . Consequently, Israel has an obligation to bring an end to its presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.”⁵ This robust and enduring legal consensus crystallized after protracted deliberations spanning almost eight decades among multiple UN organs and was anchored in fundamental norms of international law: the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by war and the right of peoples to self-determination. The new UN resolution deposited this comprehensive legal framework into the dumpster. All that survived was a pathetic fragment “noting prior relevant Security Council resolutions relating to the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question” (emphasis in original).⁶ What’s more, the resolution left Gaza’s legal status suspended in juridical limbo. Nowhere did the resolution so much as hint that Gaza was part of Occupied Palestinian Territory, let alone that it was illegally occupied territory, that it is the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to exercise self-determination in the entirety of this Palestinian territory, and that Israel must withdraw from it “as rapidly as possible.” Shorn of any public standing, left dangling by a thread in a juridical void, Gaza was reduced by the Security Council in one fell swoop to the extralegal status of—in the idiom of the European conquest of Africa—res nullius (“thing of nobody”).

The resolution divided into three mandates: a Board of Peace (BoP), an International Stabilization Force (ISF), a political roadmap:

Board of Peace. The resolution authorized “the establishment of the Board of Peace (BoP) as a transitional administration with international legal personality that will set the framework, and coordinate funding for, the redevelopment of Gaza.” The resolution fell silent on the modalities of the BoP—how it would be constituted, who would sit on it. . . —except for one crucial detail. Its first operative paragraph “[e]ndorses” without caveat the Trump Plan (annexed to the resolution) and “calls on all parties to implement it in its entirety” (emphases in original). The Trump Plan in turn resolved that the BoP—surprise! surprise!—“will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump.” Lest any doubt lingered on this score, the US representative asserted right after the Security Council vote that “the Board of Peace, which will be led by President Trump, remains the cornerstone of our effort.” In their subsequent remarks, not one Council member voting in favor of the resolution registered any objection.⁷ The resolution didn’t hold the Board accountable to the UN or any other entity; except that it “requests” that the Board submit a biannual progress report to the Security Council, it made no provision whatsoever for external oversight (emphasis in original). The wonder was that it didn’t include in an annex the formal transference of deed to The Trump Organization. Provoking widespread consternation, President Trump boasted in early 2025 that “[t]he U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip” and “[w]e’ll own it.”⁸ If, in Trump world, we denotes me—l’etat, c’est moi— then his words proved prescient: courtesy of the Security Council, Gaza now figured as one more property in his portfolio. Will his next move be, per the board game Monopoly, to build houses and hotels in his fantasy Riviera on the Mediterranean? The BoP was a throwback to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 when the Great Powers handed title over the Congo to the International Association of the Congo created and controlled by one of Europe’s richest men, King Leopold II of Belgium. He was then declared the Congo’s sole owner: “It was a personal state, the property of one capitalist of genius, the King-Sovereign.”⁹ Leopold had pledged to “open to civilization the only part of our globe where it has yet to penetrate, to pierce the darkness which envelops whole populations.” In the shadows of his “crusade worthy of this century of progress,” Leopold presided over a lucrative sideline in the ivory and rubber trade in which he worked to death as many as 15 million Congolese. It was an auspicious precedent, and the Security Council passed the baton to a deserving heir: didn’t Trump possess in abundance the apposite “international legal personality”—of a criminally deranged megalomaniac?

The resolution charged the BoP with coordinating both humanitarian aid and reconstruction. Neither will come to pass. A 2025 ICJ advisory opinion found that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was the only humanitarian organization in Gaza technically competent to provide aid at scale, and that Israel must cooperate with it.¹⁰ However, falsely alleging that UNRWA was riddled with Hamas members who diverted aid, Israel has fought tooth and nail to discredit and dismantle it. The original US draft of the new Security Council resolution sustained Israel’s spurious allegations as it allowed that “any organization found to have misused aid would be ineligible to provide continued or future assistance—a provision that was perceived to target the UN Relief and Works Agency.”¹¹ So brazen was this frontal attack on the ICJ opinion that the US was forced to tone it down, but the adopted text still incorporated language—the BoP was charged with “ensuring such aid is used solely for peaceful uses and not diverted by armed groups”—that Israel could exploit so as to refuse cooperation with the only relief agency able to meet Gaza’s humanitarian needs. To judge by its track record going back decades, Israel won’t admit more than a “humanitarian minimum” of aid, if that much and probably a lot less. The days of weaponizing starvation as a method of warfare won’t be over until and unless the Gaza “question” has been “solved.”¹² The reconstruction of Gaza won’t happen because it can’t happen and because Israel won’t let it happen. Just clearing out the more than 60 million tons of rubble intermixed with toxic substances and unexploded ordnance—not to mention, dead bodies—would take more than 15 years, while actual rebuilding could take as many as eight decades.¹³ And, anyhow, Israel won’t allow it. It didn’t expend more than two years turning Gaza into a moonscape so as to make it uninhabitable, only to abruptly reverse course, clasp hands with the people of Gaza, intone om, chant Give Peace a Chance, sing Kumbaya, and, like the Seven Dwarfs, merrily heigh-ho, heigh-ho while rehabilitating Gaza’s pulverized infrastructure. Israel will no doubt justify a ban on entry of cement and steel by reinvoking the specious pretext that Hamas might redirect them to build tunnels. The Security Council resolution provided no external oversight mechanism and so no one can compel either the BoP or Israel—not that the powers-that-be give a damn—to cooperate with UNRWA or admit reconstruction material.¹⁴ The almost certain outcome of the new resolution will be that Gaza returns to the status quo ante 7 October—its inhabitants forgotten by the outside world, left to languish and die in a concentration camp—with the crucial difference that Gaza itself is no more. The Palestinians of Gaza have been left with the two options signaled by Israel when it embarked on the genocide: stay and die, or flee.¹⁵ Israel gave its all to induce a stampede; now it will have to settle for a trickle. The intermittent ceasefire in place, Israel’s final solution has entered a new, no less lethal albeit less visible, phase.¹⁶ Greenlighting it, the Security Council stands in the dock of history as an accessory to genocide.

International Stabilization Force. The resolution authorized the establishment of a “temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF),” the charge of which was to “stabilize the security environment in Gaza by ensuring the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip.” The ISF was to operate in “close consultation and cooperation” with Egypt and Israel. It must be conceded that the resolution recruited a pair of virtuosos at pacification: Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seized power in a military coup that climaxed “in one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history,”¹⁷ while Israel had invested the previous two years in comprehensively stabilizing Gaza by erasing it. Although emphatic that Gaza must be disarmed “us[ing] all necessary measures,” the resolution was conspicuously mute as to why it must be. The reason for this silence wasn’t hard to find. If Gaza had to be demilitarized because of the 7 October massacre, then the obvious question arose: After committing a genocide that killed incomparably more innocents, didn’t Israel also need to be demilitarized? Judging by the resolution’s content (or the lack thereof), Israel’s conduct was as virginally pure as the white sheet of paper upon which the resolution was inscribed. Its criminal blockade and periodic hi-tech killing sprees before 7 October¹⁸ and the genocide that ensued after 7 October vanished from the UN annals. Only barbaric Gaza needed to be civilized, at gunpoint.¹⁹ For all the horror of 7 October, the fact also remained that a people under occupation wasn’t legally debarred from armed resistance. International law prohibits use of military force “by an administering power to suppress widespread popular insurrection in a self-determination unit,” while “the use of force by a non-State entity in exercise of a right of self-determination is legally neutral, that is, not regulated by international law at all.”²⁰ An occupied people must obey the laws of war but, all the same, it retains the prerogative to violently resist a violent occupation. The Security Council resolution thus triply breached international law: it punished the lesser but not the greater violator of international humanitarian law; it granted Israel a right to suppress armed resistance not granted other occupiers; it denied Gazans a right to armed resistance not denied other people living under occupation.

Political Roadmap. The resolution stated that the BoP would cede sovereign power over Gaza only when “the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program,” and that “[a]fter the PA reform program is faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” By making Palestinian self-determination and statehood conditional, the UN regressed to the League of Nations era. In the League mandates system instituted after World War I, former colonies of the defeated Central Powers, allegedly “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” were placed under the “tutelage” of “advanced nations” until they demonstrated the fitness to be independent. After World War II, the twin principles of decolonization and self-determination seized center stage at the UN (the League’s successor). The self-serving paternalistic conceit, incorporated in the League Covenant, that “non-self-governing territories” required a tutelary period before attaining independence was scrapped. Instead, the seminal 1960 UN General Assembly resolution, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” (1514), asserted that “inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence.” The new Council resolution annulled 65 years of UN practice.

The resolution didn’t specify objective benchmarks to assess whether or not the PA “has satisfactorily completed its reform program,” while “Gaza redevelopment” will almost certainly and at minimum take decades. What’s more, even if the PA “satisfactorily completed” and “faithfully carried out” reforms, and even if Gaza redevelopment was sufficiently advanced, the prospect of Palestinian self-determination and statehood would still be indeterminate: meeting these criteria “may”—or may not—advance the political process, and even if it did, the Palestinian people would still only be on a “pathway” to statehood—i.e., not yet there. That outcome would be held in abeyance pending “a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.” In other words, were Palestinians to meet all the—nebulous—demands put on them, they still could not exercise their “inalienable right” to self-determination and statehood even in the distant future until and unless Israel agreed to it. The resolution further stated that “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will withdraw from the Gaza Strip based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors [?], and the United States, save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat” (emphasis added). That is, the resolution endowed Israel with veto power over both the exercise of Palestinian self-determination and any withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, thus ensuring that neither would ever come to pass.

A multitude of UN resolutions as well as ICJ opinions had variously and cumulatively found that Palestinians constituted a “people”; that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, constituted “Occupied Palestinian Territory” (OPT); that the Palestinian people possessed an “inalienable right” to self-determination and statehood in the “entirety” of the OPT; that Israel’s occupation of the OPT was “illegal”; and that Israel was legally obliged to withdraw from the OPT “as rapidly as possible.” The political roadmap laid out in the resolution eviscerated the massive UN record on the Israel-Palestine conflict that was assembled over many decades with near-unanimous agreement. By signing onto resolution 2803 (2025), the Security Council committed suicide. The ultimate irony was that the supreme political organ of the UN immolated itself in order to placate a gangster juggernaut in Washington that heaped only scorn on the organization, to the point of sabotaging by defunding it; and, even as the Trump administration successfully extorted—at the behest of its, albeit scaled down, gangster doppelganger in Tel Aviv—this criminal resolution, it would not be deterred from its crazed crusade, in which no mode of coercion was out of bounds, to crush (or neuter) the UN and anything else that stood in its path. The hunger increases with each bite. Is prostrate Gaza now safely in the rear-view mirror of the Arab/Muslim states—Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates—that lined up with Big and Little Moloch, or is it a morbid signpost of their own futures?

***

The original purpose of this book was therapeutic: to isolate, so as to enable the UN to excise, pockets of corruption that, albeit rare but nonetheless egregious and pernicious, tainted its record on the Gaza genocide. The UN did not halt the enormity that befell Gaza but overwhelmingly did not abet it either. Until now. The new resolution has directly implicated the Security Council itself in the ongoing genocide. It has also condemned the tormented and tortured people of Gaza, or those not killed off, to eternal martyrdom. “The fish stinks first from the head.” It’s only a matter of time before the corruption in the Security Council spreads throughout the UN system. An epoch has passed. The silently raised hands ratifying the resolution sounded its death knell. Going forward, the cause of Justice will have to be reconstituted on a new foundation. It must be said without recoiling—for it is the Truth—but also being cognizant of the gravity of the verdict that: After 17 November 2025, the UN is a rotting corpse.

1. “UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025)” (17 November 2025, S/RES/2803; https://docs.un.org/en/S/RES/2803(2025)). Russia and China abstained. The prime impetus behind President Trump’s initiative sprang not from the “Gaza conflict” per se but elsewhere. If he was to seal his long-coveted “deal of the century” formally incorporating Saudi Arabia within the US-Israeli sphere of influence (à la the Abraham Accords), then the Saudis needed the fig leaf of a “ceasefire” to placate Arab public opinion. Hardly had the ink dried on the UN resolution before the Saudi crown prince received a royal reception at the White House.

2. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), para. 11.

3. Ibid., para. 8.

4. See, e.g., “United States of America: Draft resolution” (25 October 2023, S/2023/792; https://docs.un.org/en/S/2023/792), and “Russian Federation, Sudan and Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: Draft resolution” (25 October 2023, S/2023/795; https://docs.un.org/en/S/2023/795).

5. See Chapter 3 of this book.

6. It also made desultory reference to unspecified “international legal principles,” “international law, including international humanitarian law.”

7. United Nations Security Council, 10046th Meeting, “The Situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian Question” (17 November 2025; https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4093696?ln=en&v=pdf).

8. Dave Lawler and Barak Ravid, “Trump Claims U.S. Will ‘Take Over’ Gaza and Turn It into New ‘Riviera,’” Axios (4 February 2025; https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/trump-gaza-takeover-palestinians-israel).

9. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: The white man’s conquest of the dark continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: 1991), passim (“personal state” at p. 588).

10. See Chapter 3 of this book.

11. Security Council Report, “The Middle East, including the Palestinian Question: Vote on a draft resolution to authorize an International Stabilization Force in Gaza” (16 November 2025); https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2025/11/the-middle-east-including-the-palestinian-question-vote-on-a-draft-resolution-to-authorise-an-international-stabilization-force-in-gaza.php).

12. See the Prologue of this book and Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza: An inquest into its martyrdom (Oakland: 2018), p. 33n57.

13. See Prologue of this book, and Paul Brown et al., “‘Worse than Starting from Scratch’: How big is the task of rebuilding Gaza?” BBC (15 October 2025; https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5e4ee9r13o).

14. The alarm has of late been sounded that Gaza will be partitioned into a security “Green Zone” comprising more than half of Gaza, where reconstruction will be permitted for returning Gazans, versus a “Red Zone” comprising the bulk of Gaza’s population, where reconstruction will be barred until Hamas is disarmed. If for a disheartening reason, such fears are unfounded: there won’t be reconstruction anywhere in Gaza. Israel will either annex the security perimeter or turn it into a buffer zone. In either case, it won’t allow for reconstruction except perhaps for a handful of Potemkin villages that will house the “hewers of wood, drawers of water”—i.e., coolie labor—as well as armed Gazans collaborating with Israel. The last thing Israel wants in any areas under its control is more Arabs; ideally, they would be Arab-rein. See Sari Bashi, “Gaza: The threat of partition,” New York Review of Books (23 November 2025); Dov Lieber and Summer Said, “US Pushes a Hamas-Free ‘Green Zone’ in Gaza,” Wall Street Journal (21 November 2025); Jonathan Whittall, “How the US-Israeli ‘Peace Plan’ Will Partition Gaza,” Al Jazeera (22 November 2025; https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/22/how-the-us-israeli-peace-plan-will-partition-gaza); Emma Graham-Harrison, “US Military Planning for Divided Gaza with ‘Green Zone’ Secured by International and Israeli Troops,” Guardian (14 November 2025).

15. See Prologue of this book.

16. Amnesty International, “Post-Ceasefire: Israel’s genocide in the Occupied Gaza Strip continues” (27 November 2025; https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/0527/2025/en/).

17. Human Rights Watch, All According to Plan: The Rab’a massacre and mass killings of protesters in Egypt (12 August 2014; https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/08/12/all-according-plan/raba-massacre-and-mass-killings-protesters-egypt).

18. See Prologue of this book.

19. Whereas several States (US, UK, France, Greece, Panama) supporting the resolution condemned Hamas in statements right after the vote was taken, except for a single sentence by Algeria, not one State supporting the resolution uttered one word of criticism of Israeli actions after 7 October.

20. James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law, second edition (Oxford: 2006), pp. 135–37, 147. See also Heather A. Wilson, International Law and the Use of Force by National Liberation Movements (Oxford: 1988), pp. 135–36 (“[the law] is still not agreed upon” as to the right of national liberation movements to use force, although “the trend . . . since 1960 . . . has been toward the extension of the authority to use force to national liberation movements,” while “the use of force to deny the free exercise of a people’s right to self-determination is contrary to the principles of international law”); A. Rigo Sureda, The Evolution of the Right of Self-Determination: A study of United Nations practice (Leiden: 1973), pp. 331, 343–44, 354 (“The fact that the Security Council has never expressly condemned the guerrilla activities of the Palestinians can be interpreted as an implied recognition of their right to recover at least the territories from which they were displaced in the June 1967 hostilities, and to do so by the use of force if necessary”); Finkelstein, Gaza: An inquest, pp. 140–41.