Free Palestine! Defeat Zionism! Struggle for the Right to Return!

Statement of the ILPS on the Occasion of Palestinian Land Day 2026

On Palestinian Land Day, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their valiant struggle of national liberation to take back their land and sovereignty against the triad of Zionist settler-colonialism, US imperialism, and predatory Western colonialism.

After over 150 years of facing the psychopathic Zionist project, 75 years of settler-colonial occupation and almost 3 years into an intensified genocide, ecocide and war of starvation, the resistance of the Palestinian people has warded off extermination by the Zionist entity and frustrated all attempts of the Zionists and imperialists to impose full control over their land.

The Zionist project is based on taking Palestinian land and to exterminate the Palestinian people. This is phase one. Phase two is the realization of the “Greater Israel Project,” extending from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, which includes the entirety of Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan, and significant portions of Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The current phase of the genocide since the last “ceasefire” agreement under Trump’s “peace plan” has been a process of repackaging genocide and seeing how many war crimes and violations of international law the US-Zionist alliance – financed by the pedophilic Epstein class – can get away with.

In Gaza, over 73,000 have been confirmed killed since October 7, 2023, with real estimates at potentially over 200,000 still unidentified under the rubble. At least 692 Palestinians have been directly killed by the occupation forces since October 2025, with a multitude more killed by the restrictions on aid not let in through the Rafah Crossing.

The Zionists have established an arbitrary “yellow line” as the new border, which is moved closer to the coastline on a daily basis. Any Palestinian caught crossing this border, one that is not even marked in some areas, is shot on sight. The West Bank has been placed under de facto annexation, with 152 new illegal Israeli settler outposts built in the West Bank since the beginning of the genocide. The Zionist entity openly announced its plan to officially annex the whole of the West Bank by early 2026 and is currently evicting dozens of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem over the last week alone, closing the Al Aqsa Mosque in the midst of Ramadan, and emboldening settler-IOF coalitions to ramp up their terror campaign across the West bank, having now killed 1121 Palestinians since October 2023.

In addition to stealing the land, the Zionist entity is actively destroying it to intentionally damage the environment that the Palestinian people live upon. The International People’s Tribunal on Palestine, which gathered in November 2025, adjudicated “Israel”, the US, and other Zionist-supporting governments as guilty of having committed ecocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Radioactive materials, white phosphorous, destruction of all wastewater treatment plants and 70% of sewage pumps, and 61 million tonnes of rubble imbued with toxic materials since the genocide began have destroyed the ability for the soil in Gaza to grow anything for generations to come. Over 95% of shrubland and 97% of trees in Gaza have been wiped out and 97% of water is undrinkable in Gaza. In the West Bank, over 85% of Palestinian water has been stolen by the Zionist entity, aiming to force Palestinians off of their land via water deprivation, and desertify the land for the colonisers to “bloom” – in other words, erase and replace. In 2025 alone, 35,273 trees were damaged, destroyed or poisoned by Zionists, with over 4,000 olive trees and saplings were destroyed by Zionist settlers during the olive harvest. The Zionist tactic of mass starvation is predicated on the destroying the very means for the Palestinian people to make their livelihood and have the ability to feed themselves: by destroying their land and rendering it unusable.

A key element of the fight to free the land of Palestine since 1948 is the Right of Return for all refugees violently evicted from their land during the Nakba and the many Zionist aggressions since then. There are up to 7 million Palestinian refugees in the world due to Zionist-led displacement, many living in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Around 70% of all Palestinians, including many of those living in Palestine, are considered refugees, with up to 80% of Gaza itself being made up of refugees from the Nakba long before the genocidal war began in 2023. The Right to Return to their ancestral lands has kept the collective compass of Palestinian refugees and their children pointed towards the land of Palestine wherever they are in the world, and the iron keys to their families’ homes they were displaced from have been kept as momentos of resistance for generations to take up the rifles of the resistance to free the land from the Zionist occupation.

Since the inception of Land Day in 1976 after a general strike in which 6 Palestinians were massacred by the Zionist entity while protesting land stolen from the Palestinian villages of Sakhnin, Arraba, and Deir Hanna, it is clearer than ever that institutions supposedly founded to protect international law such as the United Nations have failed to uphold the principles of self-determination enshrined in its charter – that is, if they were even designed to uphold those principles in the first place given the influence of imperial donors. After almost 3 years of a genocide in Gaza, the International Criminal Court’s ruling against the Zionist entity has been thoroughly ignored by the imperialist states and UNSC Resolution 2803 has set the basis of its dissolution, promoting the US imperialist-led “Board of Peace”, whose objective is to fully annex Gaza and rival the United Nations itself. As the United Nations has finally accepted Palestinian nationhood, it has done so with the prerequisite that the resistance fully disarms — in other words: lay down their weapons, let their land get stolen, and their people exterminated.

But the Palestinian people and others facing occupation and aggression by the fascist US-Zionist alliance have not backed down. In all of West Asia, the call of Palestinian Land Day rings throughout the Axis of Resistance and all opposed to US imperialism and Zionism. The US-Zionist alliance has attempted to destroy and balkanize the Islamic Republic of Iran, but has completely failed to achieve even a single objective through its spineless aerial campaign, drowning amid Iran’s long-refined asymmetric warfare tactics that humiliate the US/Zionist delusion of a quick “excursion”. In Lebanon, the Zionist entity has faced defeat on the ground in the battlefield against Hezbollah and the resistance, who have destroyed nearly 100 Merkava tanks and are accelerating the collapse of the IOF, which is running critically low on reservists. Each of these struggles in the defense of national sovereignty are deeply connected to the fight for a free Palestine, and while the continued genocide throughout the entire occupied Palestinian lands have faded from global headlines behind the aggression against Iran and Lebanon, a free Palestine remains the defining fight that will end the Zionist entitiy’s fascist expansionism for good.

On Palestinian Land Day, the call to take back the peoples’ land and sovereignty and destroy US imperialism shines as a beacon in the Palestinian struggle to destroy the occupation and permanently put a muzzle on US imperialism’s attack dog in West Asia. The ILPS joins with the Palestinian people and all freedom and peace-loving people of the world on Land Day 2026 in taking up the calls to Free Palestine, Defeat Zionism, and Struggle for the Right to Return!

Signed,

International League of Peoples’ Struggle