Twenty-two organisations will gather in Freedom Square in Valletta on Monday afternoon, before the opening session of parliament, to hand each MP a letter entitled STOP COMPLICITY WITH ISRAEL – Refuse to look away!
The coalition, led by Ġustizzja għall-Palestina, demands an immediate embargo of military items to Israel and a comprehensive reduction in trade and transfers, citing the International Court of Justice rulings of January and July 2024, which found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful and obligated all states to prevent assistance in maintaining the occupation.
The letter’s language is unsparing. “Gaza is a concentration camp, where people cannot get out and cannot survive,” the NGOs write, citing UN Women figures that Israeli forces killed on average 47 women or girls every day between October 2023 and December 2025.
They describe the seizure of 70% of Gazan territory and the killing of over 23,000 children. “This is systematic mass murder,” they said, invoking the Genocide Convention’s prohibition on deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction.
The International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel’s acts in Gaza amount to genocide, ordering six provisional measures to prevent genocidal acts. Three years on, the scale of destruction is staggering: over 74,000 Palestinians have been killed and 175,000 wounded, including more than 20,000 children.
Satellite assessments show 82% of structures in Gaza damaged or destroyed, with entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble and 90% of hospitals damaged. In the West Bank, settler violence has surged, with the UN recording over 1,380 settler-related incidents in the first seven months of 2026 alone. UN experts describe state-backed terror squads driving ethnic cleansing and annexation.
Against this documented reality, Malta’s diplomatic posture is cast as complicity. “Breaches of international law and violations of human rights are not stopped through complicity and lipservice but through action. This action is long overdue,” the letter reads. The coalition notes that Malta’s trade with Israel doubled in the first half of 2026.
National Statistics Office figures confirm imports from Israel reached €147.8 million between January and June, up from €73.4 million in the same period last year, the largest increase from any individual country, driven by a 297% surge in mineral fuel purchases. “It is scandalous,” the letter says. “Malta must stand on the right side of history.”
The demand arrives amid Europe’s systemic failure. In April 2026, EU foreign ministers refused to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement despite an official review finding Israel guilty of “indiscriminate attacks, starvation, torture and apartheid”.
Germany, Italy and Austria blocked the move; Amnesty International called it a “moral failure”. Malta endorsed a partial suspension, yet its foreign minister’s office made no public statement on the outcome. When 18 organisations later urged Malta to support an EU ban on settlement trade, PEN Malta’s Kurt Borg said the government preferred “a route everyone knows leads nowhere”, a choice he described as “obstruction by procedure”.
Former Labour premier Dom Mintoff invited the PLO to open an office in Valletta in 1974; former PN foreign minister and president of Malta Guido de Marco, as UN General Assembly president, described Palestine’s plight as a “tragedy of dispossession”.
But today, Malta recognised Palestinian statehood only in September 2025, after France and the UK. When Israeli drones struck the Conscience, a Gaza-bound aid vessel, in international waters off Malta in May 2025, the government did not summon the Israeli ambassador; the prime minister insisted on “alleged” facts that the UN Human Rights Office had already found sufficient for an independent investigation.
Monday’s protest is a demand that Malta’s MPs choose between procedure and principle. “Impunity only fuels more injustice,” the organisations write. In a country that once gave colonised peoples a voice, the silence now is a choice, and it is being named.
Signatories:
- Ġustizzja għall-Palestina
- Moviment Graffitti
- Blue Door Education
- ADPD
- Association for Justice, Equality and Peace
- ReLeaf Malta
- Front Maltin Inqumu
- Grupp Newtralità u Paċi
- Inizjamed
- Żminijietna – Voice of the Left
- Friends of the Earth, Malta
- Speakup! Malta
- African Media Association Malta
- Dance Beyond Borders
- PEN
- TAMA
- Il-Kollettiv
- The Lebanese Advocates
- Kopin
- Momentum
- Humanists Malta
- General Workers Union
