Indo-Palestine Solidarity Network letter to BRICS summit 2026

Indo-Palestine Solidarity Network
Address – 505 Link Apartments, 18 IP Extension, Delhi – 110092 Contact – john.dayal[at]gmail.com

11 September 2026

To,

Their Excellencies, the Heads of State and Government of the Member Countries of BRICS

Eighteenth BRICS Summit, Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi

Through Shri Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India and Chair of BRICS 2026
Subject: The responsibility of BRICS towards Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and the peoples of West Asia

Excellencies,

We write on behalf of the Indo-Palestine Solidarity Network and the undersigned Indian civil society organisations as you meet in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. Your summit speaks of resilience and cooperation, qualities the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon and Iran have been forced to display because the international order meant to protect them has failed to do so.

BRICS now represents nearly half of the world’s population, and that weight brings obligations with it. The Global South cannot credibly claim a greater voice in global governance while responding with caution, or with silence, to the gravest sustained assault on international law in West Asia in living memory. South Africa, a founding member of this grouping, recognised as much when it brought its genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice.

The war on Gaza has not ended. A ceasefire was declared in October 2025, yet health officials in Gaza report that Israeli strikes have killed more than 1,270 Palestinians since then. Humanitarian access remains restricted, hospitals are short of essential medicines, and the siege continues in practice if not in name. In the occupied West Bank, the United Nations has recorded settler attacks at a rate higher than in any year on record, with mosques set alight and thousands of families driven from their land. This is annexation carried out in open defiance of the International Court of Justice, which found in 2024 that the occupation itself is unlawful.

The same impunity now extends across the region. On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran, itself a member of BRICS, and killed its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on the first day. That morning a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Minab, killing around 165 people, most of them children, in an attack Amnesty International has attributed to the United States. Ceasefires have since been announced, extended, suspended and declared over from Washington as it has seen fit, leaving the region hostage to decisions in which its peoples have no say. Israel, meanwhile, has held to an unyielding stance on Iran and has repeatedly acted in ways that undermine any negotiated end to the war. On 8 April, within hours of the announcement of a ceasefire between the United States and Iran, it launched strikes across Lebanon that killed more than 350 people in a single day, and its attacks on southern Lebanon have continued despite a further ceasefire in June.

We must also answer a narrative that has taken hold in Western capitals and much of the international media, which presents Iran as an aggressor against its Arab neighbours. This war was begun by the United States and Israel. Iran’s retaliation was aimed at the American military installations from which that war was being waged, among them Al Udeid in Qatar, Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates, Ali Al Salem in Kuwait and the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Civilians in the Gulf, several of them migrant workers from South Asia, were also killed, and we mourn them as we mourn the dead of Minab and Gaza. Their deaths are an argument against foreign bases that turn host nations into battlefields, and not a justification for the war that brought those missiles.

We therefore call upon BRICS to:

1. Demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to Israeli military operations in the West Bank, unrestricted humanitarian access and a complete end to the siege of Gaza.

2. Support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it ends its occupation, its apartheid policies and its violations of Palestinian national and human rights.

3. Act as a collective to initiate the suspension of Israel from the United Nations until it complies with international law, ends the occupation and implements the relevant UN resolutions, drawing on the General Assembly’s action against apartheid South Africa in 1974.

4. Take the lead in initiating negotiations for a just and comprehensive political solution, which must not again be controlled by the United States and its Western allies whose support has sustained Israel’s impunity, and in which the Palestinian people are central to every decision about their future.

5. Play a major role in developing a comprehensive regional settlement that addresses Palestine, Lebanon and Iran together, along with the wider consequences of Israeli and Western military intervention in West Asia.

6. Recognise that the war on Iran and the attacks on Lebanon belong to the same project that sustains the occupation of Palestine, namely the pursuit of unchallenged military dominance over West Asia. BRICS should condemn the aggression against a fellow member state and against Lebanese sovereignty, reject every form of regime-change policy, press for an independent international investigation into the Minab school strike and other attacks on civilians, and insist that any ceasefire be multilateral, binding and inclusive of Lebanon rather than open to unilateral revision.

7. End military and economic support for Israel by halting the supply of arms, military technology and other assistance that enables its continuing violations of international law.

We make a particular appeal to the members of BRICS from West Asia and the Arab world. Iran, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates live closest to the consequences of this war and have borne its costs in lives, trade and security. Their voices for justice in Palestine and against the militarisation of the region carry a weight that others cannot match, and we urge them to stand firmly for a collective position grounded in international law.

India’s own position deserves attention, especially in the week that it chairs this summit. India stood for decades with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, yet its growing military, economic and political relationship with Israel, maintained throughout the destruction of Gaza, makes it complicit in Israel’s continuing crimes. Article 51 of the Constitution of India directs the State to promote international peace and security and to foster respect for international law. As host, India has the opportunity to return to an independent foreign policy rooted in that constitutional commitment and in its own anti- colonial tradition.

The present moment demands more than expressions of concern in a closing declaration. BRICS has the collective political and economic strength to challenge the structures of impunity that have protected Israel for decades, and to advance a settlement founded on equality, freedom, self-determination and an end to occupation and apartheid. We urge you to act, and not merely to speak, for Palestine and for all the peoples of West Asia.

Yours sincerely,

Dr John Dayal
Dr Joycia Thorat
Dr Jaya Mehta
Dr Ranjan Solomon
Sr. Liza
Ms Bhavna Sharma
Maimoona Mollah
Adv Anastasia Gill
Mr Ishu
Vineet Tiwari
Ms. Shalini Merrill

On behalf of,
Indo-Palestine Solidarity Network