Mr. António Guterres
Honourable Secretary-General of the United Nations

Seventy-seven years of crime, massacre, and apartheid have led to the killing and displacement of millions of innocent people from the land of olives, Palestine.

Israel, operating through a system founded on brutality and intimidation to ensure the survival of its illegitimate existence, recognizes no moral or humanitarian red lines. It has never refrained from employing any terrorist or criminal methods to eliminate its opponents—to such an extent that neither hungry children waiting in food lines, nor pregnant women, nor the elderly, sick, or disabled can feel any semblance of safety.

Among the victims are journalists—those duty-bound to report the truth of these assaults on humanity and dignity to the world—who have become legitimate targets in the eyes of this regime. Whether assassinated in secret while working, like Ghassan Kanafani; crushed alive under bulldozers before the world’s eyes, like Rachel Corrie; or openly targeted during live reporting, like Shireen Abu Akleh, the fate of many journalists has been marked by violence.

Yet they are merely a few of the hundreds whose most dangerous weapons were their pens, microphones, and cameras—tools that Israel rightly perceives as more threatening than its vast arsenals of nuclear warheads and its horrific biological and chemical terror tactics. Even so, with all these instruments of oppression, the regime has still failed to prove the legitimacy and security of its occupation to the awakened consciences of the free peoples of the world and the responsible journalists who stand with them.

The Israeli regime's desperate efforts focus on silencing the voice of the media. They may kill journalists, but they can never kill the truth.

The calling of journalism is to deliver the message—a mission that, in the end, blood itself will proclaim louder and more resoundingly than any pen or camera ever could. Thus, the blood of 300 martyrs in Gaza and Lebanon in the past 20 months, soon to be joined by the blood of 12 martyred media workers in Iran and hundreds of free journalists across the world, will only hasten the decline toward the occupiers’ inevitable fate.

An attack on the media is an attack on human awareness itself. There is no need to prove that the crimes of Israel constitute a flagrant violation of conventions and international laws that mandate the protection of journalists under all circumstances.

We, expressing our solidarity with all oppressed journalists and their grieving families who, throughout history and in every corner of the world, have stood against tyranny, respectfully call upon you, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, to officially designate June 16th, the date of the Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) headquarters, as the International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to Victims of Terrorism against the Media.