International Month for Habitat 2025 – In Solidarity with Palestine

The United Nations has dedicated World Habitat Day 2025 to the theme “Responding to Urban Crises”—a call for managing the crises that affect urban areas, from climate disasters to violent conflicts that deepen inequalities, and to promote existing tools and approaches for effective responses.

This International Month for Habitat (Urban October), we denounce the genocide of the Palestinian people. The bombing and destruction of Gaza—every corner of the Gaza Strip—is not only an attempt to erase the ancestral culture of the Palestinian people, but also a violation of their most basic rights.

Click here to access the website dedicated to the campaign

Satellite images show destruction of trees (top) and greenhouses (bottom) in north Gaza. Yin et al (2025)

So we ask ourselves:
What does this situation in the distant Middle East have to do with our lives?

I am a mother caring for my small children in Korogocho, a slum in Nairobi. We lack water, my roof leaks, and what I earn selling trinkets at the market barely feeds us.

I am a day laborer. I cut sugarcane with my machete all day. They pay me very little—just enough to provide for my family here in Mali, with its vast deserts and scarce farmland controlled by corporations.

I am a miner in Sierra Leone. I work for months without seeing my people, standing in the river, gathering stones, hoping to find a diamond that will be sent off to Europe.

I am a construction worker, a migrant. I came to Italy from Tunisia. I live in a little corner of the building site. I hope to save money to help my relatives.

I am a woman in Bogotá, washing clothes for a couple who are always busy with their businesses. I can barely survive.

My partner, our children and I pick cotton here in the south of India. The boss pays little for each sack. We live under an improvised tent for months—just a piece of fabric that barely protects us from the scorching sun.

My partner and I rent a single room in downtown Mexico City. We share a bathroom with many others.

And still, we ask: What do we have to do with that distant war—with the genocide in Palestine, with the bombs falling on Gaza?

The truth is, we have everything in common. Because when they destroy the land and the homes of a people, they are also speaking to us. In every corner of the world, poor people, marginalized communities, women and men, workers and migrants are stripped of the most basic things: shelter, water, work, dignity.

What Palestine is experiencing is not foreign to us. It is part of the same system that condemns us to misery, that pushes us to the margins, that robs us of hope.

That is why, even though our lives unfold far away,
We know that the Palestinian people’s struggle is also our own.
Because their resistance is a mirror of our resistance.
Because as long as there is one people denied the right to exist, none of us can truly live in peace.

The world is now a global village: when one end of the world is affected, the entire world feels its impact. The people of Palestine deserve to live; they are part of the global human community, capable of contributing immensely to development and peace.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. We are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 3 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. This right is being denied to Palestinians whose lives and futures are cut short, whose security has been shattered.

Article 5 of the same Declaration affirms that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Yet the people of Gaza are subjected daily to cruelty and inhuman conditions: their homes destroyed, their access to water and sanitation denied, famine imposed, children going days without food, and civilians killed while seeking humanitarian aid.

The people of Gaza are being degraded and punished for crimes they did not commit.

As the Habitat International Coalition (HIC), we urge States to uphold the right of the Palestine People to self-determination. Read and share HIC’s detailed demands at this link. 

Urban October unites us to say:
Free Palestine — dignified habitat for all peoples!

Grace Chikumo Mtonga  – HIC President                       Guillermo Javier Marzioni – HIC Vicepresident