According to information from the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 55,000 people – mostly women and children – have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army since October 2023. The rest of the population has been subjected to forced displacement and is denied access to basic resources. Every Palestinian person in Gaza is at risk of death from Israeli bombs and bullets, from the impossibility of caring for treatable diseases, or as a result of the devastating impacts of using starvation as a punishment.

The evidence of genocide committed by the State of Israel under the Netanyahu government against the Palestinian people has galvanized international solidarity and global humanitarian action. Faced with the complicity, inaction or half-heartedness of most of the world’s governments, activists and human rights defenders have mobilized to provide humanitarian support and denounce the situation. However, many governments are responding by repressing and criminalizing these actions.

Among the most recent examples are the Israeli government’s assault, kidnapping, arbitrary detention and subsequent deportation of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla crew and the Egyptian State’s blocking of the Global March to Gaza through extensive immigration controls, systematic arrests and illegal detention of participants and deportations. No less serious is the failure of many embassies to effectively protect their nationals in the face of flagrant violations of their rights, going so far as to reproach them for participating in humanitarian actions.

Meanwhile, in many other parts of the world, especially in countries such as the United States, France and Germany, expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people are systematically repressed and criminalized.

We are witnessing not only the perpetration of genocide in plain sight and in real time, but the use of State force and institutions, and those of other de facto powers such as economic and media powers, to silence protests and support for the Palestinian people. No less worrying is the gradual escalation of the conflict that has already spread to Iran, affecting the geopolitical equilibrium and potentially leading the world to a military conflagration with unpredictable consequences. 

This is a mirror – on a large scale and with global visibility – of what is happening in many other territories, including those of our Mesoamerica, where extractivist interests and ultra-conservative ideologies have come together to perpetuate territorial plunder and the dynamics of accumulation by dispossession. Stopping the genocide in Gaza is therefore not only an ethical duty towards the Palestinian people, it is also about standing up to one of the most criminal and explicit expressions of the policies of death with which global capitalism, hand in hand with patriarchy and white supremacism, seeks to dispossess us of our lives and our territories.

For all these reasons, Mesoamerican women defenders stand in solidarity with our Palestinian sisters and with all those putting their bodies on the line to stop the barbarity of genocide; we demand an end to all forms of persecution, repression, criminalization, censorship and attacks against those who raise their voices for Palestine and who act in solidarity and for humanitarian support.

We also embrace all our sisters in Iran who, after decades of denouncing, resisting and surviving the imposition of a theocratic and deeply misogynist regime, are now exposed to the barbaric expansionist warfare provoked by Israel and the United States.

Finally, above all, we demand that States in the Global North stop repressing solidarity with Palestine and that all States exert pressure on the State of Israel to put an end to genocide and military aggression against other States and territories.