My colleague, Athena Rayburn, Executive Director of AIDA, put a simple but legally fundamental proposition before the Security Council today: Resolution 2803 did not create a legal vacuum in Gaza. The Council may endorse the Board of Peace, but its legality (and success) cannot be measured by its existence. It must be measured against the legal endpoint already determined by the International Court of Justice: an end to Israel’s unlawful presence and realization of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. Nor can the Board of Peace become a device through which the rights of Palestinians are made subordinate to the requirements of Israel, the occupying Power. Moreover, Israel cannot lawfully condition impartial relief on political acquiescence, silence or acceptance of its policies, and nor can the Board of course and its US backer. Article 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention imposes obligations in relation to relief schemes which are not optional, and cannot be displaced by a new institutional architecture devised under Resolution 2803. Yet international NGOs have been deregistered, specialist staff denied entry, essential medical and humanitarian items rejected, operational space reduced, and access made dependent upon decisions of the very Power whose conduct humanitarian organizations are required to scrutinize. There is a larger constitutional point too. In adopting Resolution 2803, the Security Council did not divest itself of its primary responsibility to ensure peace and human security. Still less did it suspend peremptory norms of international law. In other words, delegation is not abdication. If the Council is not certain of the facts in Gaza, including the futility of the Board of Peace in reversing Israeli wrongs, it has powers of inquiry. Athena’s final request was therefore both practical and juridical: go to Gaza, urgently. See the facts. Hear directly from Palestinians and humanitarian actors working with them. Then discharge the responsibilities the Charter places upon you.