The road to famine in Gaza
JVL Introduction
“We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip.” declared Prime Minister Netanyahu on 18th October 2023.
This statement and others by senior Israeli officials were, say Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad, declarations of an intent to deprive the Palestinians in Gaza “of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies”.
That is, they point out, the legal definition of “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” a crime against international law under the Rome Statute.
The scale of what is happening is new, but ever since Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, “it has controlled the Palestinian food basket, engineering the nutritional intake of its inhabitants and using food as a weapon to manage the population”.
The attempt to delegitimise UNWRA is apiece with all this, a further attempt at what it is not unreasonable to see as an attempt “to annihilate Gaza’s population and render the region’s recovery impossible”.
RK
This article was originally published by New York Review of Books on Sat 30 Mar 2024. Read the original here.
The road to famine in Gaza
Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are at the brink of famine—a human-made disaster with roots in Israel’s history of using food as a weapon.
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If the NY Review of Books and the authors will give permission, this report should be shared as widely as possible with other media, the ICJ, UN and national leaders, and NGOs because it shows with far greater detail over many years the way Israel is destroying the lives of Gazans. Israel must be shamed into stopping. Far too few people are in the least aware of most if not all of what is revealed by this report.
There is no question that this article underlines the slow deprivation of Gaza’s population of life giving necessities that amount to incremental genocide even before October 7, also emphasised by Ilan Pappe in his work.
It’s not a “famine”. It is a starvation and as such, an act of Genocide