GENEVA (Reuters) – The Palestinian foreign minister on Tuesday accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war against around 1 million people in Gaza and condemned the “international failure” to respect Palestinians’ rights at a U.N. meeting in Geneva.
The U.N. World Food Programme says half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million is starving as the expansion of Israel’s military assault into the southern part of the Gaza Strip, in response to October’s bloody cross-border rampage by Hamas militants, has cut people off from food, medicine and fuel.
Israel has said it allows aid into Gaza via the Rafah crossing and has signalled that the Kerem Shalom crossing could soon reopen to help process aid deliveries.
“As we speak, at least 1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them children, are starving, not because of a natural disaster or because of lack of generous assistance waiting at the border,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told a U.N. event to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“No, they are starving because of Israel’s deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war against the people it occupied,” he said.
“Rather than insisting on respecting the Palestinian people’s basic right to eat and drink water, we are living through this dystopian reality that excludes Palestinians from the basic, most basic rights afforded to all human beings,” he said, describing it as an “utter international failure” to protect Palestinians.
Israel says its instructions to people to move to areas it says are safer are among measures it is taking to protect civilians as it tries to root out Hamas militants who killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostage in its Oct. 7 attack.
Israel’s ambassador Meirav Eilon Shahar did not specifically respond to the starvation accusation in a speech to the same U.N. meeting.
In remarks to reporters shortly afterwards, made alongside the mother of U.S.-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg Polin, she criticised al-Maliki’s address for making no mention Hamas and its deadly attacks on Israel.
“Nothing about Oct. 7, nothing about the atrocities that were committed by Hamas,” she said.
Israel’s retaliatory assault has killed at least 18,205 people and wounded nearly 50,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, which says many thousands more dead are uncounted under the rubble or beyond the reach of ambulances.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber and Emma Farge; Editing by Alison Williams)
