Palestinian Christian leaders slam UNSC Res 2803 as colonial, conditional on “reforms” and silent on occupation, as Israeli strikes kill 13 in Lebanon camp.
Newsroom (20/11/2025 Gaudium Press ) An ecumenical coalition of prominent Palestinian Christian leaders issued a sharply worded statement from Jerusalem on Wednesday condemning United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803, adopted November 17, 2025, as insufficient, restrictive and reminiscent of “traditional colonialism.”
The declaration, signed by figures including Emeritus Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna and Emeritus Lutheran Bishop Munib Younan, comes against a backdrop of unrelenting violence even after the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire of October 4, 2025, and the November 2024 Israel-Hezbollah truce.
In the latest escalation, Israeli aircraft struck the Ein el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon, Lebanon, late Tuesday, killing at least 13 people and wounding dozens in what residents described as one of the deadliest single attacks on Lebanese soil since last year’s ceasefire with Hezbollah. The Israeli military claimed drones targeted a mosque used by Hamas as a “training camp,” an assertion immediately rejected by the Palestinian movement. Hours later, new Israeli evacuation warnings were issued to multiple villages in southern Lebanon — days before Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to visit the country.
Inside Gaza itself, Palestinian health authorities report approximately 250 killed and 650 wounded since the October ceasefire took effect, underscoring the signatories’ assertion that “the destruction of Gaza and its population continues.”
While acknowledging that Resolution 2803 and the ceasefire have produced “less genocide, less murder, less displacement,” the Christian leaders argued the text’s core flaws outweigh any marginal gains.
Chief among their criticisms:
- The resolution makes Palestinian self-determination explicitly conditional on unspecified “reforms,” which the statement suggests are designed less to combat corruption than to compel acceptance of Israeli and American-imposed limits on sovereignty. “A people’s right to self-determination cannot be conditioned,” the text insists, “especially by those who have prevented this self-determination for decades.”
- The proposed “Peace Council” chaired by U.S. President Donald Trump and an accompanying International Stabilization Force are portrayed as a foreign administration of Gaza, “smacking of traditional colonialism.”
- The resolution is faulted for its narrow scope, effectively treating October 7, 2023, as year zero of the conflict while ignoring decades of occupation, settlement expansion and what the signatories call the “violent dismantling” of refugee camps and villages across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
- No mention is made of settler violence, military raids or the systemic obstacles facing Palestinians under occupation.
The statement traces the conflict’s roots to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which it describes as extensions of British colonial policy that institutionalized inequality between Jews and non-Jews. While explicitly recognizing the historical Jewish connection to the land and rejecting the notion that Israeli Jews are “mere settlers,” the text argues that connection “is not exclusive and does not give them the right to expropriate and evict, repress and occupy, destroy and commit genocide.”
The only durable solution, the Christian leaders maintain, lies in dismantling the “system of ethnocentrism, discrimination, and occupation” and building a single multicultural, pluralistic society that guarantees full equality to all inhabitants “from the river to the sea.”
Resolution 2803 was adopted 13-0 with Russia and China abstaining. It grew out of the same U.S. diplomatic effort that produced the October Gaza ceasefire and envisions Trump personally heading a supervisory “Peace Council” during a transition period.
As Pope Leo XIV prepares to arrive in Lebanon — where Ein el-Hilweh’s ruins still smolder — the Palestinian Christian statement serves as a stark reminder from within the Holy Land itself that, for many, the latest Security Council text represents not a breakthrough but a perpetuation of injustice under new packaging.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Asianews.it
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