‘Safety, justice and accountability must be collectively defended’

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TU Delft has acknowledged the ‘possibility of genocidal violence’ in Gaza, but continues to collaborate with Israeli institutions credibly linked to the military apparatus carrying it out. TU Delft’s recent policy shift announcing a partial moratorium is the result of organised, sustained and costly social pressure.

The advice is that no new partnerships or projects with Israeli universities or organisations should be allowed unless they are shown to not contribute to complicity. However, the same assessment process used for new proposals should also be applied to existing ones in order to stop benefiting those organisations engaged in human rights violations.

The precautionary imperative

We welcome the outcome, but it does not go far enough. When there is a credible risk of contributing to atrocity crimes, institutions have a legal and moral duty to act, even in the absence of absolute certainty.

This is the foundation of the precautionary principle embedded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, OECD due diligence frameworks, and Dutch and international law on genocide and war crimes. A clearer line must be drawn. Integrity requires urgent action, not delay. What the precautionary policy means for TU Delft is clear.

• Freeze high-risk collaboration until partners prove they are not involved in oppression and human rights violations.
• Reverse the burden of proof: it should not be the victims of human rights violations who bear the burden of proving harm. Instead, institutions and collaboration partners must demonstrate that their projects are not connected to any violations in order to proceed. This principle, already reflected in the position taken by the moral deliberation chamber at Tilburg University, should be adopted at TU Delft as well.
• Adopt the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) guidelines for academic institutional boycott, a principled and nonviolent framework based on international human rights law.

Why the moral deliberation report is not enough

The current moral deliberation outcome fails to provide any guidance or protection for students, staff and researchers who have already taken steps to disengage from collaborating with Israeli institutions credibly linked to war crimes and genocide.

These acts of ethical refusal grounded in legal obligations under the Genocide Convention and international human rights law are already happening. Yet the report offers no protocols, no safeguards, nor any institutional support for those exercising conscientious objection resulting from their due diligence.

A response grounded in integrity should have been immediate, principled, and precautionary

A response grounded in integrity should have been immediate, principled, and precautionary. Instead, TU Delft’s delayed and ambiguous approach reflects a profound failure to meet the current urgency and legal and moral gravity.

It took TU Delft nearly 17 months after the International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 which found South Africa’s genocide case against Israel plausible and issued binding provisional measures to even acknowledge the possibility of genocide. It took TU Delft nearly 17 months after sustained global protests, open letters and statements, and the legitimate efforts of local students and staff demanding institutional accountability and divestment, to even utter the word genocide.

Let us not forget the context in which this moral deliberation arises. As of June 2025, it has been a full year since the Executive Board received a detailed ‘dossier of complicity’, prepared by a committee of TU Delft staff and students. This bottom-up research listed TU Delft’s partnerships with Israeli institutions and called for public acknowledgement and corrective action. That call went unanswered.

By 18 March 2025, at least 55,493 people had been confirmed killed in Palestine, including over 17,400 children, and at least 129,320 had been injured. Death toll estimates are now higher than 100,000. In the last months, the systematic killing of civilians through starvation, targeted bombing, and mass shooting has escalated dramatically.

Who we are and what we are doing

TU Delft for Integrity is a grassroots initiative comprising academic staff, researchers, and students. We are responding to a systemic and structural flaw in how TU Delft deals with complicity in atrocity crimes.

We are united by a shared commitment: to uphold the TU Delft Code of Conduct

We are united by a shared commitment: to uphold the TU Delft Code of Conduct, to support each other in resisting complicity, and to compel TU Delft to live up to its own values as well as its obligations under international law. This initiative is rooted in that integrity, and in a belief that safety, justice, and accountability must be collectively defended.

We are proud of the diverse and principled composition of our group. It includes PhD candidates, professors, staff, and lecturers – people across roles and responsibilities. We come from both the Global South and the Global North, and our experiences span ethics, Holocaust scholarships, and academic research at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. Among the members of the group are war survivors. Our group is gender-diverse, some of us have personally faced unsafe or repressive situations at TU Delft and have responded with courage and integrity.

We are taking the initiative to do what is right without delay. We are building a community that refuses to stay silent. We are organising ourselves in support of ethical refusal, conscientious objection, and bottom-up accountability. We are refusing to normalise the unacceptable and we invite you to join us.