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28-03-2024
UNITED NATIONS/ GAZA CITY: After months of warnings, a recent UN-backed report offered hard statistical evidence that the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is turning into a man-made famine.
It has increased the pressure on Israel to fulfil its legal responsibilities to protect Palestinian civilians, and to allow adequate supplies of humanitarian aid to reach the people who need it.
The UN’s most senior human rights official, Volker Turk, said in a interview that Israel bore significant blame, and that there was a “plausible” case that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.
Turk, who is the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that if intent was proven, that would amount to a war crime.
Israel’s economy minister, Nir Barkat, a senior politician in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, dismissed Turk’s warnings as “total nonsense – a totally irresponsible thing to say”.
Like his cabinet colleagues, Barkat insisted that Israel was letting in all the aid offered by the US and the rest of the world. Israel says the UN fails to distribute whatever is left once Hamas has helped itself but a long line of Lorries fully loaded with aid supplies desperately needed in the Gaza Strip is backing up on the Egyptian side of the border with Rafah. They can only enter Gaza through Israel, after a complex and bureaucratic series of checks.
The absence of adequate supplies has forced Jordan, and now other countries including the US and UK, to drop aid from the air – the least effective way to deliver humanitarian supplies.
Palestinians on the ground fighting to secure a share have drowned as they try to swim to pallets that have landed in the sea, or have been crushed when parachutes fail.
The US Navy is also sending an engineering flotilla across the Atlantic to build a temporary pier to land aid by sea.
None of that would be necessary if Israel granted full road access to Gaza and expedited the delivery of relief supplies through the modern container port at Ashdod, only about half an hour’s drive north of the Gaza Strip.
In an interview from Geneva, Turk said evidence had emerged that Israel was slowing down or withholding the delivery of aid.
Turk condemned the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers on 7 October, including killing, rape and hostage-taking but he also said that no side in the war should evade accountability for its actions, including for any attempt to withhold aid supplies from the people who need it in Gaza.
“All of my humanitarian colleagues keep telling us that there is a lot of red tape. There are obstacles. There are hindrances… Israel is to blame in a significant way,” he said.
“I can only say the facts speak for themselves… I understand that this needs to be controlled, but it cannot take days for it to be done. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
