By Richard Falk
21 Oct 2025 – By rewarding impunity for genocide, Trump’s ceasefire proves why a civil society-led tribunal is needed to uphold accountability and document Palestine’s fight for justice.
The Gaza Tribunal, a people’s tribunal, was formed a year ago in response to the failure of the established world order of sovereign states and international institutions to stop what experts and ordinary people increasingly recognized as genocide in Gaza.
It will hold its final session from 23-26 October 2025 at Istanbul University.
Our initiative was inspired by an earlier civil society effort during the Vietnam War, when leading public intellectuals Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre established the Russell Tribunal, which held hearings in 1966 and 1967.
Its mission was to report on the international crimes of the United States and to legitimize growing anti-war sentiment in the West.
The underlying premise was that when the state system fails to uphold international law or to ensure accountability for grave crimes that affect global peace and security, people possess a residual authority and responsibility to act.
In the half-century since, many similar tribunals have emerged around the world. Their shared purpose is to speak truth to power and legitimize solidarity initiatives that seek to mount pressure on governments and institutions to take action.
Such people’s tribunals are also intended to encourage civil society activism, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement launched by Palestinian NGOs in 2005.
Unlike national or international courts, people’s tribunals do not claim legal authority.
They are overtly partisan, driven by moral conscience rather than formal procedure. They provide a platform for survivor testimony and expert analysis, with the aim of mobilising global activism in pursuit of justice.
Their focus extends beyond legal culpability to encompass broader moral and political responsibility. The tribunal embodies these principles through its Jury of Conscience – individuals of diverse backgrounds and nationalities who share a commitment to moral integrity and to exposing the Palestinian ordeal in Gaza.
Seeking truth
In certain respects, the tribunal’s work resembles that of United Nations truth-seeking mechanisms, such as the reports of the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. These have persuasively documented evidence of genocidal intent by Israel and its complicit allies.
Yet unlike the tribunal, UN rapporteurs operate as neutral experts, professionally bound to follow evidence wherever it leads.
In an unprecedented act of retaliation, the current UN special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, was personally sanctioned by the US government, denied entry to the country despite her credentials and had her American assets frozen.
The punitive response to UN truth-telling underscores the need for independent civil society efforts to expose the reality of human suffering caused by Israel’s unlawful and immoral policies.
From its inception, the tribunal has pledged complete independence from government interference, with no active politicians or officials involved in its work.
It is against this background that some may argue that recent developments, particularly US President Donald Trump‘s much-publicised diplomacy and the resulting fragile ceasefire in Gaza, render the tribunal redundant.
They may see the tribunal as an unhelpful distraction from the supposed work of peacebuilding, or from the UN’s paralysis in the face of two years of genocide in an occupied territory where it bears a special institutional responsibility.
The reality, however, is that such developments make the tribunal more essential than ever. When governments and international institutions abandon justice, it falls to ordinary people to uphold it.
Illusions of peace
The attention devoted in recent days to the so-called Trump ultimatum to Hamas, whose acceptance led to the return of all Israeli hostages within 72 hours, reflected the coercive nature of the process.
Hamas was told to comply or face a US-backed Israeli resumption of the genocide that Trump, in his fiery language, forecast as the “opening of the gates of hell”.
Hamas dutifully delivered all of the living hostages and as many of the remains of the dead as it managed to recover. In response, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinians imprisoned without charge since 7 October 2023 – effectively hostages themselves.
This prisoner exchange produced a ceasefire in Gaza, accompanied by celebrations in Israel limited to the return of the hostages, and in Gaza, expressing joy about the ceasefire, the release of detained Palestinians, and the partial withdrawal of Israeli forces.
At the same time, there were many flaws in the arrangements when viewed from a Palestinian perspective.
The proposed transition to a peaceful future, outlined in the 20-point plan and boasted about by Trump in grandiose terms, seems at best premature and, more likely, never to be realised.
Recent statements and behaviour by Israel’s leaders and public appear as determined as ever to pursue a dehumanising and punitive approach towards the still unwelcome Palestinian presence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israeli ceasefire violations in the first few days resulted in at least 10 Palestinian deaths and the blocking of half of the agreed humanitarian deliveries to a population that is starving, disease-ridden, lacking potable water, and deprived of health services and medicines.
The Palestinian population, stunned and devastated by two years of genocide that deliberately destroyed health and sanitation facilities as well as more than 90 percent of residential structures, continues to suffer under catastrophic conditions.
To live without bombs, even temporarily, is surely a blessing. Yet to exist in primitive tent communities without toilets or kitchens, amid rubble containing the missing bodies of friends, neighbours and relatives, should be regarded as a slowdown of the genocidal assault but hardly its end – or even its replacement by a post-genocide phase resembling the pre-7 October 2023 apartheid-style occupation.
A broken process
In this atmosphere, it remains imperative to expose Israel’s harsh policies and practices that continue to impose emergency, dehumanising conditions and vulnerabilities upon the entrapped population of Gaza.
Israel is reported to have given material support to anti-Hamas clans and gangs to aggravate the grave conditions that persist.
While the ceasefire and the prospect of a peaceful future may be welcomed, it is notable that the positive results were achieved through reliance on an unlawful ultimatum threatening intensified violence.
Beyond this, the entire process was guided by and weighted in favour of Israel and the United States – the two states most closely identified with the perpetration of two years of unremitting genocide.
In effect, the political actors guilty of genocide were rewarded by being entrusted with controlling the peace process for their own benefit.
This is a perversion of justice. Imagine the outrage if surviving Nazi leaders had been authorised to preside over the post-World War Two peace process.
The ‘legitimacy war’
The tribunal does not claim historic importance, but its relevance remains undiminished. It exists to validate the charge of genocide and to reaffirm the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and statehood.
Both dimensions of the present Gaza reality are airbrushed out of existence by the self-congratulatory bombast of Trump’s diplomacy.
Those who perpetrated genocide have so far not only evaded any kind of formal accountability for their crimes but have also benefited, except to the extent that Israel is now experiencing eroded legitimacy as a sovereign state and is widely viewed as a pariah.
This dynamic of delegitimation has occurred despite the international community’s complete failure to apply standards of accountability in the form of reparations or a reconciliation process that exchanges acknowledgement of past crimes for amnesty.
That others, rather than the perpetrators and their enablers, are expected to bear the costs of Gaza’s reconstruction is an assault on the very notion of moral and legal responsibility.
What the tribunal seeks to achieve is the sharpening of a populist tool that constructs an accurate archive and narrative of past and present.
Its assessments contribute to the relevance of voices of conscience in civil society – a form of symbolic politics that influences questions of legitimacy.
In this respect, the side that won the “legitimacy war” for control of moral and legal discourse generally determined the political outcome of the anti-colonial struggles of the last half-century, despite being militarily inferior.
These are lessons the US should have learned in Vietnam, and Israel in its long encounter with the Palestinian people.
There is little doubt that the Palestinians have won the legitimacy war.
Although the future is highly uncertain, there is little doubt that, as of now, the Palestinians have won the legitimacy war – an outcome that will be certified by the proceedings of the Gaza Tribunal.
In their struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, Palestinians have achieved a notable symbolic victory since 7 October 2023, and Israel a corresponding defeat.
To record and document this outcome in Gaza is, by itself, enough to justify holding the Gaza Tribunal’s final session in the days ahead.
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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.
27 October 2025
Source: transcend.org