Israeli Regime Using Hunger as ‘Weapon’ against Gazans: UN Expert
The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, said that all children under five in Gaza are suffering from malnutrition and are at risk of irreversible damage to their physical and mental development.
“We’ve never seen 2.2 million civilians made to go hungry within weeks. We have never seen this degree of hunger used as a weapon so quickly and so completely, ever,” Fakhri told Al Jazeera.
“It doesn’t happen by chance. Starvation, wherever it happens, is always the result of political choices and this is the same case here,” Fakhri said.
“There was a 16-year blockade before this. So even before the war, half of the people in Gaza were food insecure and 80 percent depended on aid,” he said.
“Then [Israel] imposes a siege during the war. Then it destroys civilian infrastructure. So Israel has destroyed hospitals, homes, roads, making everyday life impossible. And finally, what I’m receiving reports of is the destruction of the food system itself,” he added
‘War crime of starvation’
Another expert, Alex De Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the US, echoed Fakhri’s comments, noting that Israel's actions amount to the "war crime of starvation".
He told Al Jazeera that the speed and scale of the food crisis in Gaza are “unprecedented” in modern history.
"I have been studying this for 40 years and I have never seen a population reduced [to this level of hunger] with such speed and ruthlessness," De Waal said.
“[The destruction of] food, medicine, water and sanitation is being done on a scale that I don’t think we have witnessed anywhere else in the contemporary world,” he added.
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The food crisis in Gaza comes amid a deadly escalation of violence by Israel, which has killed at least 65 Palestinians in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday.
According to the latest figures, at least 25,295 people have been killed and 63,000 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7.
Source: Agencies
