Islamabad, President of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, Lt. Gen. Jibril Rajoub, has issued a powerful open letter to the international sports community, calling for urgent action to uphold the principles of justice, equality, and human dignity amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

Addressing world sports leaders, athletes, and people of conscience, Rajoub said he was speaking “from the heart of a wounded Palestine… from amidst the rubble of our stadiums and the wreckage of our hopes.” He highlighted the devastating toll of 718 days of conflict, which he described as a “relentless, merciless war of annihilation.”

Citing UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who recently declared the situation in Gaza as “the worst level of death and destruction I have witnessed in my life,” Rajoub stressed that the crisis is not a political opinion but a “final alarm bell for all of humanity.”

He lamented the destruction of Palestinian sports infrastructure, the deaths of more than a thousand athletes, and the displacement of tens of thousands, saying: “These were our colleagues. They were our future champions. They were our children who looked to all of us as symbols of hope.”

Rajoub accused the Israeli sports system of complicity, alleging that it integrates illegal settlement clubs into its national leagues in violation of international law and the Olympic Charter. He criticized the double standards in which critics are branded anti-Semitic while “genocide itself is called self-defense.”

Invoking the Olympic Charter and sacred religious texts, Rajoub urged sports leaders to demonstrate integrity and reject silence in the face of mass suffering. “Can the Olympic Movement stand idly by while the most fundamental human right—the right to life—is violated against its own members?” he asked.

Concluding his appeal, Rajoub called on the global sports family to prove that Olympic values are not “empty words on paper,” but a living commitment to humanity.