The Alliance for Peacebuilding’s Statement on the Violent Conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 12, 2023
CONTACT
Nicholas Gugerty | ngugerty@allianceforpeacebuilding.org
Washington, DC, USA — The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) condemns the horrific violent extremist attacks in Israel and calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities. We stand with all of our members working in Israel and the Palestinian territories to reduce and prevent conflict and build sustainable peace.
AfP urges all parties to this violent conflict and the international community to ensure unimpeded humanitarian and peacebuilding assistance to protect civilians. All parties must abide by international humanitarian law and protect civilians throughout Israel and the Palestinian territories. All parties should cease targeting civilians, civilian infrastructure, and residential areas, ensure the most vulnerable have unimpeded access to humanitarian and peacebuilding assistance, and allow the international community to monitor the situation.
All parties must work toward an inclusive political solution that prevents and reduces violent conflict and builds sustainable peace in Israel, the Palestinian territories, the region, and globally. However, a political solution requires recognizing the profound complexity of the conflict, prioritizing dialogue among all parties, centering the communities most impacted, and promoting the rights, dignity, and protection of all civilians.
While the international community must respond to the immediate crisis, this violent conflict demonstrates once again why conflict and atrocity prevention and peacebuilding must be first-order priorities, not something relegated until after the crisis is over. Centering and prioritizing a global prevention-oriented approach to development assistance and foreign policy decision-making will reduce the need for costly humanitarian assistance and securitized interventions—ultimately saving lives and resources—and address record-breaking violent conflict and violence globally.
Finally, as the world’s attention is drawn to this conflict, the international community must not divert critically needed resources away from violent conflict and atrocity prevention efforts in Sudan, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Sahel, and other conflict-affected and fragile states.
The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP), named the “number one influencer and change agent” among peacebuilding institutions worldwide, is an award-winning nonprofit and nonpartisan network of 200+ organizations working in 181 countries to prevent and reduce violent conflict and build sustainable peace. AfP cultivates a network to strengthen and advance the peacebuilding field, enabling peacebuilding organizations to achieve greater impact—tackling issues too large for any one organization to address alone.