War on Gaza: Palestinians face 'deliberate starvation' by Israel, says UN expert
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri has said that the spread of disease and Israel’s “starvation campaign” in Gaza is “killing more people than bombs and bullets”.
He added that the damage inflicted by famine “is going to be carried by Palestinians for several generations in the future”.
His comments follow his new report to the UN General Assembly last week, in which he detailed how Israel has used starvation in Gaza “with the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Palestinian people”.
“Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza,” Fakhri said.
According to the report, 34 Palestinians, the majority of them children, are known to have starved to death since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October.
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It explained that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s food system, including the poisoning and destruction of agricultural land, and the destruction of ports and fishing vessels served to make the entire population dependent on humanitarian aid.
“In turn, Israel then used humanitarian aid as a political and military weapon to harm and kill the Palestinian people in Gaza,” the report read, referring to the severe restrictions Israel has imposed on humanitarian aid flows to the besieged enclave.
Deliberate siege
In a post on X, Fakhri said that this strategy predates 7 October, explaining that Israel started restricting the flow of goods into Gaza in 1991 and imposed a full siege on the enclave in 2000.
He also emphasised that the campaign is not just restricted to Gaza.
“Israel has been destroying the Palestinian food system for 70-plus years. Destroying orchards and farms. Harassing/ killing peasants, fishers and shepherds,” he said.
Fakhri added that Israel’s attempts to starve Palestinians are part of its push to “erase them from their homeland and territory," pointing out that in 2023, Israel seized more Palestinian land than in any given year in the past three decades.
In the report, Fakhri emphasised that famine is a “political” rather than a purely “humanitarian” problem, explaining that it has become a widely deployed tactic to displace people from their land.
“Starvation is always deliberate, international, structural and long lasting,” he said in a post on X.
In Gaza, he explained the only way to alleviate the crisis is for countries to impose economic, political and cultural sanctions on Israel.
The UN has long warned of the risk of famine in Gaza, but has yet to officially declare it.
In July, 10 top UN experts, including Fakhri, said that Israel is engaged in an “intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people”.
They cited the deaths of three children aged 13, nine and six months, from malnutrition in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah since the end of May, leading them to assert that a famine is now under way.
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