Nakba day was ‘not the end of catastrophe but just the beginning’, says Iran
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations says the Nakba (catastrophe) Day “was not the end of catastrophe but unfortunately just the beginning,” highlighting decades of ongoing displacement, occupation, and systemic injustice against the Palestinian people.
Amir Saeid Iravani made the remarks on Thursday during a UN commemoration marking the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, the 1948 forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland as Israel proclaimed its illegal existence.
He said that the meeting takes place at a time when the occupying entity, with the support and assistance of the United States, “deliberately” targets hospitals, schools, women, children, UN staff and journalists in a genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.
“Evidence of egregious crimes of the regime are undeniable, the world as well as the International Court of Justice and other relevant courts are fully aware of the details and extent of savagery of the regime,” Iravani added.
“Footage of the genocidal attacks of the Israeli regime against a hospital in Palestine on 13 May 2025, whereby people were bombed, thrown into air, and shredded to pieces, is only a portion of evidence demonstrating the ongoing Nakba and immense suffering that the Palestinian people are physically and mentally enduring ever since.”
The envoy noted that the Israeli regime and its supporters—particularly the United States—have been perpetuating a long-standing campaign of misinformation aimed at undermining Palestinian rights and distorting the reality on the ground.
“Notwithstanding, throughout these decades and even nowadays, Palestinian people have been enduring another form of grave injustice,” he said, “and that is false narratives propagated by the Israeli regime and its supporters, especially the United States, that aim to change the place of victim and culprit.”
He went on to condemn the hypocrisy of those who speak of peace and human rights while enabling violence and suppression.
“They hypocritically call for peace in the region but in fact expand the scale of genocide and aggression, to claim the importance of human rights but actually grossly violate such rights of Palestinians,” Iravani stated.
“To claim freedom of speech but eventually suppressing innocent people who call for ending the carnage, to claim freedom of information but in reality whitewash the horrendous crimes of the Israeli regime; all the hypocrisy only to deny the right of the Palestinian people in defending themselves and to return to their homeland.”
He further said that the Zionist regime and its sponsors are the main cause of regional instability. “The Israeli regime and its supporters are the reason that millions of Palestinian people have been displaced from their homeland, their children become orphaned, their families lost their loved ones together with the regular life in Palestine; they are the reason for the catastrophe and instability in the region,” he said.
The international community has repeatedly called for an end to Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people, but the regime keeps “intensifying their crimes under the illusion that the world might ignore” these atrocities, he pointed out.
Israel waged its genocidal Gaza onslaught on October 7, 2023, but it has failed to achieve its declared objectives despite killing 53,010 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring more than 119,998 others.
The usurping entity accepted longstanding negotiation terms by the Hamas resistance group under a Gaza ceasefire, which began on January 19.
On March 18, however, Israel unilaterally broke the truce and resumed its relentless bombing of Gaza.
