MUN Position Paper on Israel Palestine Conflict: A Guide

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You've got a country assignment, a committee guide, and a document full of conflicting figures. Your deadline is approaching, but every attempt to summarize Israel and Palestine turns into either a history essay or an argument you can't confidently defend.

A strong MUN position paper on the Israel Palestine conflict needs a narrower purpose: explain what your assigned country supports, establish what your evidence proves, and propose measures your committee can pursue. You don't need to settle every historical dispute. You need dated wording, a defensible national position, and recommendations that survive questions about authority, funding, and compliance.

Paper Structure and Word Budget at a Glance

Use this skeleton before writing full paragraphs. The allocations below are suggested drafting targets, not conference requirements.

Position paper sections and word budget for a 1,200-word paper

Section	What it does	Words in a 1,200-word paper
Header and topic line	Committee, agenda item, country and date	30
Background	Context, dates and key actors	180
Country position	Stated stance and legal basis	250
Evidence	Dated figures from UN sources	280
Proposed action	Operative measures with actors and monitoring	360
Sources list	Citations in one consistent format	100

Your chair's instructions override this budget. If the conference sets a page limit, formatting requirements, or a different citation system, work within those rules rather than shrinking the font to preserve an arbitrary word count.

Treat the header as an administrative check, not decoration. Copy the agenda item exactly, identify your assigned country, and use the committee's official name. A paper addressing the entire conflict can miss an agenda focused specifically on humanitarian access, displacement, or civilian protection.

Give Each Part a Separate Job

The background answers what is at stake. Keep only the context necessary to understand the decision before the committee, rather than recounting every diplomatic initiative.

The country position answers what your delegation believes and why. The evidence answers what supports that argument, while proposed action answers what delegates should negotiate. Don't make the reader extract your policy from a long description of suffering.

A practical drafting order is:

Start with the recommendation. Decide what outcome your country can support before selecting background material.

Write the national position. Identify its priorities, negotiating room, and limits.

Select supporting evidence. Keep facts that change the case for your recommendation.

Add necessary context last. Delete history that doesn't explain a policy choice.

For conference-specific formatting decisions, compare your instructions with this Harvard MUN position paper guide, but never substitute another conference's conventions for your own chair's requirements.

Make the Paragraphs Connect

A useful opening sentence makes a claim that the paragraph then substantiates. Your background might identify an access problem; your national-position paragraph explains why your country prioritizes it; your evidence establishes its scope; your recommendations address the obstacle.

If you're over the limit, cut repeated principles and historical detail before cutting the mechanism that makes your proposal workable.

How to Build a Country Stance in Four Steps

A country stance is a commitment other delegates can test, not a statement of sympathy. Begin with the authority and record behind it, especially if you personally disagree with the country you've been assigned.

Read the committee mandate. List relevant instruments with their document symbols and the paragraphs you intend to use. Distinguish the committee's power to recommend, investigate, request reporting, or take decisions, rather than assuming every UN body has interchangeable authority.

Check your country's record. Collect its relevant votes, explanations of vote, foreign-ministry statements, and aid or sanctions decisions. Use the country profile worksheet to separate enduring priorities from a recent statement responding to a particular event.

Test authority, evidence, and implementation separately. Put legal propositions in one column, humanitarian findings in another, and proposed mechanisms in a third. A reported access restriction can establish an operational problem, but it cannot itself establish your committee's authority to impose a remedy.

Write a defendable stance sentence. Name an action, the actor expected to carry it out, and a limit your delegation won't cross. Then check that each element follows from the country record rather than your preferred personal position.

Keep the Analytical Layers Separate

OCHA's Occupied Palestinian Territory overview describes a crisis involving occupation, blockade, internal Palestinian divisions, recurrent hostilities, and alleged non-adherence to international humanitarian and human-rights law. That operational account is useful context, but it isn't a judicial determination of every incident it describes.

Make the distinction visible in your notes:

Analytical layer	Question to answer	Drafting test
Legal authority	What instrument supports this proposition?	Can you identify the relevant provision?
Factual evidence	What happened, where, and during which period?	Does the source support your exact wording?
Implementation	How could the proposed response operate?	Is the actor authorized and equipped to act?

Your committee assignment changes the instruments and procedures you should emphasize. A Security Council proposal, a General Assembly recommendation, and a Human Rights Council reporting initiative require different institutional reasoning, even when they address related civilian concerns.

A workable hypothetical stance is: [Country] supports UN-coordinated humanitarian access with independent verification, while requiring transparent distribution procedures and opposing measures outside this committee's mandate.

That sentence is only a starting point. Replace its priorities and limits with your country's documented choices. If its government supports a measure conditionally, preserve the condition; if its record contains tension, explain that tension instead of manufacturing consistency.

Sourcing and Citation Rules for Israel Palestine Research

Rank sources by what they can prove, not by how authoritative they sound. A ministry statement can establish what a government said. It cannot independently verify the events described in that statement.

Source types and how to cite them

Source type	Example	Use it for	Citation note
UN resolutions and committee documents	Security Council and General Assembly resolutions	Mandate and legal authority	Cite the document symbol and paragraph
Treaty text and ratification records	Geneva Conventions and related protocols	Legal obligations	Cite the article and check ratification status
OCHA and UNRWA situation reports	Dated humanitarian updates	Figures and access data	Cite the report title, report date and data cut-off date
ICJ opinions	Advisory opinion concerning humanitarian relief	Legal findings	Cite the case number and paragraph; mark it as advisory
Official statistics	UN statistical datasets	Population and trend data	Cite the dataset name and retrieval date
Foreign ministry statements	Official government statements	Stated national position	Attribute as a claim, not a verified fact
NGO and think tank reports	Human-rights documentation and analysis	Allegations and interpretation	Attribute the source and note where findings are contested
News reporting	Wire and newspaper coverage	Dating events and background	Verify every figure against a primary report

This is a functional hierarchy, not permission to use only one kind of document. You may need a resolution to establish institutional authority, a humanitarian report to describe conditions, and a national statement to explain your delegation's position.

Build Citations Someone Can Check

Use a consistent bibliography pattern:

Record the report's publication date separately from the period its figures describe. For legal material, cite the actual provision or paragraph rather than attaching an entire judgment to a broad assertion. The guide to citing UN documents can help you keep document symbols and pinpoint references consistent.

When researching across document collections, you can find structured data through search from Context.dev to organize discovery. Treat search output as a route to the underlying document, not as a replacement for reading it.

Attribute Without Evading the Substance

For a contested allegation, identify who documented it and what their documentation establishes. Write the organization documented alleged incidents when that matches the source, rather than turning an allegation into an adjudicated finding.

Don't confuse precision with artificial neutrality. If a competent body makes a finding, describe that finding accurately; if a party disputes it, explain the dispute where it matters to your argument. Prefer primary documents over secondary summaries, and retain qualifications that affect meaning.

Before keeping a citation, ask whether a chair could locate the relevant passage quickly. If the answer requires guessing which page, dataset version, or reporting period you mean, your reference needs work.

Building an Evidence Base You Can Defend

Create an evidence log before writing the evidence paragraph. Each row should contain a single claim, its geographic scope, its reporting period, its source location, and its relevance to your recommendation.

Start from the agency's actual report, not a screenshot or a search snippet. Copy the report title beside the claim, record the cut-off, and mark whether the number is an observed count, estimate, projection, financial requirement, or assistance target.

Evidence log for an Israel-Palestine paper

Evidence area	Theater	Figure from UN reporting	Date to state
Humanitarian funding, appeal baseline	Gaza and West Bank	Requested funding and target population	Appeal year and funding cut-off
Humanitarian funding, later update	Gaza and West Bank	Disbursement recorded in the selected update	Update's stated cut-off
Food insecurity	Gaza	Projected emergency-phase population	Projection period, not publication date alone
Displacement	West Bank	Displaced Palestine refugees from northern camps and surrounding areas	Period specified in the report
Settler attacks	West Bank	Documented attacks causing casualties or property damage	Reporting year

The entries are deliberately different kinds of evidence. Money requested isn't money delivered; a projection isn't an observed outcome; documented incidents aren't a complete population survey. Preserve those distinctions when converting notes into prose.

Use the Funding Gap to Identify a Policy Problem

The OCHA Financial Tracking Service's appeal figures show that the 2025 inter-agency Flash Appeal sought approximately US1.14 billion, roughly 28%, had been disbursed, leaving a gap of approximately US$2.86 billion.

The total establishes scale. The shortfall gives your delegation a more useful negotiating question: what financing arrangement would improve the predictability of humanitarian operations?

A funding recommendation might ask donors to publish disbursement schedules and request transparent reporting on allocations. It shouldn't assume that a pledge creates operational capacity or that distributing resources is possible without access and security arrangements.

Choose Evidence That Changes the Recommendation

A May 2025 IPC analysis cited in OCHA's Humanitarian Situation Update 288 projected that more than 1 million people, or 54% of Gaza's population, would face emergency-phase acute food insecurity from 11 May through the end of September 2025. That supports attention to food access and nutrition, but the wording must remain a dated projection, not a claim about present conditions.

For every retained entry, add a short policy note: supports predictable financing, requires distribution monitoring, or justifies nutrition support. Delete impressive-looking figures that don't help explain your proposal.

Use the Israel-Palestine UN resolution guide to organize your search for relevant instruments, then read the instruments themselves. A humanitarian statistic explains the problem; the applicable text helps establish what your committee can do about it.

Sample Paragraphs and a Draft Clause to Adapt

These models use placeholders because a credible national position can't be supplied without knowing your country and committee. Replace the brackets with checked material, and rewrite the language so it reflects your delegation's negotiating priorities.

Background Model

UNRWA's situation report records more than 33,360 Palestine refugees displaced from northern West Bank refugee camps and surrounding areas after January 2025. For a committee whose mandate covers relevant protection reporting, you could adapt:

Insert the dated evidence sentence with its citation in your submitted version. Don't add a generic claim that the committee can enforce compliance unless its mandate supports that claim.

Country-Position Model

[Country] supports [specific action] through [authorized actor], consistent with its [dated vote or official statement], while requiring [monitoring safeguard] and rejecting [documented national limit].

Follow that sentence with evidence from the country's record. An explanation of vote is particularly useful when support for a resolution doesn't mean agreement with every provision. Avoid claiming that a government supports all UN initiatives merely because it voted for one text.

Operative-Clause Model

The ICJ's October 2025 advisory opinion stated that Israel must agree to and facilitate relief schemes provided by the UN and its entities, including UNRWA, under the circumstances identified by the Court. Describe it as advisory, while distinguishing the opinion's procedural character from the underlying legal obligations it addresses.

For a Security Council simulation, consider this proposed clause:

The reporting interval is a proposed drafting choice, not an existing requirement. The clause requests a plan rather than pretending a monitoring mechanism already exists, and it specifies escalation without making automatic threats your delegation may not support.

Gaza and the West Bank need distinct operational provisions. Don't ask a convoy-monitoring mechanism to solve settlement-related violence or displacement; assign those concerns appropriate reporting and protection measures.

Use the MUN resolution-writing guide to refine operative language. The strongest clause doesn't promise that aid will arrive merely because delegates adopted it. It identifies the actor, the observable commitment, and the next institutional step if implementation fails.

Dos, Don'ts and a Final Draft Check

The most damaging mistake is a proposal that sounds forceful but can't survive a feasibility question. Calling for unrestricted aid is incomplete if your delegation can't explain inspections, security coordination, delivery responsibilities, or distribution monitoring.

In its 23 April 2026 humanitarian update, OCHA recorded 925 movement obstacles across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the highest number in two decades, and reported that aid partners could reach fewer than one million of an estimated 2.1 million people in Gaza with monthly food aid under the cited funding conditions. These findings support attention to access and coverage, but they don't establish that any particular corridor will succeed.

Pair Every Recommendation With a Failure Test

Do	Don't
Specify where a measure operates	Treat different theaters as one operational environment
Preserve the source's reporting period	Present an old estimate as a current count
Identify who made an allegation or finding	Turn disputed documentation into an unqualified legal conclusion
Trace authority to the relevant instrument	Assume moral urgency expands the committee's powers
Measure delivery and beneficiary coverage	Treat supplies entering an area as proof that people received them
Define a response to obstruction	Promise automatic enforcement without an authorized decision-maker

Frequency isn't causation. An incident count can describe the scale of reported violence, but it doesn't establish which policy caused it or predict the effect of removing a particular restriction.

Run your proposal through a practical delivery test: map the need, identify the bottleneck, assign the operational owner, and select the verification metric. For aid access, examine crossing procedures, inspection capacity, fuel, convoy security, and distribution arrangements rather than treating “open a corridor” as a complete plan.

Set proposed success thresholds before negotiations. You might measure clearance within a defined processing window, publication of reasons for denials, or independent review of disputed incidents. Label targets as your delegation's proposals, not as standards already established by international law.

Read the Final Draft Like a Skeptical Chair

Use this submission check:

Identity and scope. Does the header reproduce the agenda, and does the paper address that agenda rather than the whole conflict?

Evidence integrity. Can the reader identify each figure's theater, period, source, and type?

National consistency. Would your country recognize the position as its own, including the qualifications?

Operational clarity. Does each recommendation identify an actor, a change, verification, and a response to obstruction?

Diplomatic usefulness. Can another delegation tell what you want it to support and what you might negotiate?

Ask a coach or chair to review the draft for unsupported leaps, not just grammar. A useful reviewer should challenge your strongest recommendation and ask what happens when the responsible actor refuses.

Our Position paper generator produces a section-by-section outline with word budgets and a sourced draft for a chosen country and committee. Treat that draft as material to verify and revise, not as a substitute for understanding what you'll defend in caucus.

Prepare your Israel-Palestine brief with Model Diplomat, using our Library's 193 country profiles, leaders and blocs to check your assigned country's context. Drafting position papers, memos, and speeches is subject to the daily cap on the Free plan and included on the Pro plan; bring your committee guide and turn your draft into a position you can defend sentence by sentence.

MUN Position Paper on Israel Palestine Conflict: A Guide