UNITED NATIONS — The UN independent investigator on the right to food accused Israel of carrying out a “starvation campaign” against Palestinians during the war in Gazaa claim that Israel vehemently denies.
In a report this week, researcher Michael Fakhri claimed that it began two days after Hamas’ surprise attack in southern Israel, which killed some 1,200 people, when the Israeli military offensive in response blocked all food, water, fuel and other supplies to Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s accusations restriction of humanitarian aid were “extremely false.”
“A deliberate famine policy“You can say anything, but that doesn’t make it true,” he said at a press conference on Wednesday.
After intense international pressure, especially from close ally the United States, Netanyahu’s government has gradually multiple border crossings opened for tightly controlled deliveries. Fakhri said limited aid initially went mainly to southern and central Gaza, not to the north where Israel had ordered the Palestinians to go.
Fakhri is a professor at the University of Oregon Law School and was appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council as a researcher or special rapporteur on the right to food, a role he assumed in 2020.
“In December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80% of the world’s population experience famine or catastrophic hunger“, Fakhri said. “Never in post-war history has a population gone hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.”
Fakhri, who teaches law on human rights, food law and development, made the allegations in a report to the UN General Assembly released on Thursday.
He claims it goes back 76 years to Israel’s independence and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians. Since then, he has accused Israel of “using the full range of techniques of hunger and starvation against Palestinians, and perfecting the levels of control, suffering and death it can inflict through food systems.”
Fakhri says that since the beginning of the war in Gaza, he has received direct reports of the destruction of the food system in the area, including agricultural land and fisheries. This has also been documented and acknowledged by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and other organizations.
“Israel then used humanitarian aid as a political and military weapon to harm and kill the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he claimed.
Israel continues to insist that it is not restrictions on the number of emergency trucks entering Gaza, including food.
During Wednesday’s press conference, Netanyahu cited figures from COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees aid imports into Gaza, showing that 700,000 tons of food have entered Gaza since the war began 11 months ago.
Nearly half of that food aid in recent months has been brought in by the private sector to sell in Gaza’s markets, according to COGAT figures. But many Palestinians in Gaza say they struggle to afford enough food for their families.
Israel allows trucks carrying aid through two small border crossings in the north and one main crossing in the south, Kerem Shalom. However, since Israel’s invasion of the southern town of Rafah in May, the UN and other aid agencies say they have struggled to reach the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom to pick up aid for free distribution because Israel’s military operations make it too dangerous.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the humanitarian situation in Gaza “beyond catastrophic,” with more than 1 million Palestinians not receiving food rations in August and a 35% drop in the number of people receiving cooked meals daily.
The UN humanitarian agency attributed the sharp drop in cooked meals in part to multiple evacuation orders from Israeli security forces, which forced at least 70 of the 130 kitchens to close or relocate operations, it said on Thursday. The UN’s humanitarian partners also did not have enough food supplies to meet demands in central and southern Gaza for the second month in a row, Dujarric added.
He said the severe shortages of supplies in Gaza are the result of hostilities, insecurity, damaged roads and Israeli obstacles and access restrictions.
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AP writer Lee Keath contributed from Cairo.
