Excellencies, Heads of Delegations and Representatives of States and International Organizations

Ladies and Gentlemen

Today, in these difficult circumstances that our people are enduring, we commemorate the seventy-eighth anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophe that is ongoing until this very day, and the crime of ethnic cleansing inflicted upon our Palestinian people. This crime, carried out by Zionist militias with the support of colonial powers, led to the uprooting of 950,000 Palestinians from their cities and villages, and their removal from the land of their ancestors, which they had inherited and inhabited for thousands of years, to be displaced and replaced, transforming them into a people of refugees, witness to the attempts to steal, falsify and erase their history and heritage.

This heinous crime, the Nakba, was accompanied by numerous massacres during which tens of thousands of our people were slaughtered and killed, and their cities and villages destroyed. More than 531 towns and villages, once vibrant with cultural, economic, social, and political life, were erased.

We will not leave, and we will not forget.

We, the Palestinian people and our refugees, did not emigrate from Palestine nor leave it voluntarily in 1948, as Israel and the Zionist movement have claimed, rather, we were forcibly and coercively expelled from it. The truth is that the Palestinian people rose up repeatedly to defend their historic homeland and their existence on their land. We still remember the Palestinian revolution of 1936–1939, but colonial powers provided the Zionists with every means and force necessary to seize the land of Palestine by force of arms.

The Zionist movement’s reliance on false narratives, mythology, and the infamous Balfour Declaration from the colonial era, along with the selective manipulation of fabricated historical events does not create rights, nor does it nullify the deeply rooted historical and legal rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination. It also does not negate international law or the Charter of the United Nations.