Starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza – our government is complicit

At least 117 people were killed and more than 760 injured on Thursday as they crowded around aid lorries.

UN Secretary General António Guterres condemned the incident and said “desperate civilians” need urgent help.

Hamas accused Israel of firing at civilians, but Israel said most died in a crush after it fired warning shots.

On Thursday international criticism of Israel mounted with French President Emmanuel Macron saying civilians had been “targeted by Israeli soldiers”.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borell, described the incident as “totally unacceptable carnage”.

Reacting to the incident, Mr Guterres wrote on social media: “I condemn Thursday’s incident in Gaza in which more than 100 people were reportedly killed or injured while seeking life-saving aid.”

“The desperate civilians in Gaza need urgent help, including those in the north where the UN has not been able to deliver aid in more than a week.”

On Friday France, Italy and Germany also called for an independent investigation into the aid convoy deaths.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry called the incident a “massacre”.

The UN Security Council scheduled a closed-door emergency meeting to discuss the incident, during which Algeria – the Arab representative of the body – put forward a draft statement blaming Israeli forces for “opening fire”.

While 14 of the Council’s 15 members supported the motion, the US blocked it, according to AP news agency, citing the Palestinian UN ambassador Riyad Mansour who spoke to reporters afterwards. US envoy Robert Wood said the facts of the incident remained unclear.

Thursday’s incident took place shortly after 04:45 (02:45 GMT) at the Nabulsi roundabout, on the south-western edge of Gaza City.

Ramzi Mohammed Rihan was injured in the stampede and described to BBC Arabic what he saw.

He said: “We were informed that a shipment of flour would arrive through Al-Nabulsi Street and that there would be no shooting.

“We went to get flour to feed our children. We went to Nabulsi Street and before the trucks arrived there was gunfire.

“As the trucks entered, we headed towards them, and as we tried to get the first bag of flour out of the truck, they began to fire at us.”

Mr Rihan said he was carried to the hospital on a cart and that his X-rays have been delayed due to a lack of electricity.

Khaled al-Tarawish was also wounded and said his surgery has also been postponed due to a lack of fuel in al-Awada Hospital.

“I went to Nabulsi Street to get a bag of flour,” he said. “Because of the crowd I ran under the car, I went to the Awda hospital where they told me that I needed to have an operation but because there was no diesel fuel, they told me the operation would be carried out three days later.

“All I want is to provide the hospital with diesel fuel so that I can undergo the operation and get my treatment.”

The convoy of 30 lorries carrying Egyptian aid was making its way north along what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) described as a “humanitarian corridor” which it said its forces were securing.

IDF chief spokesman, Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, said civilians surrounded the convoy and people began climbing on the lorries.

“Some began violently pushing and even trampling other Gazans to death, looting the humanitarian supplies,” he said. “The unfortunate incident resulted in dozens of Gazans killed and injured.”

Israeli tanks, he said, “cautiously tried to disperse the mob with a few warning shots” but pulled back “when the hundreds became thousands and things got out of hand”.

Another IDF spokesman, Lt Col Peter Lerner, said some civilians approached a checkpoint which was about 70 metres (230 feet) away and ignored warning shots fired by the soldiers there.

He said the soldiers, fearing that some of the civilians posed a threat, then opened fire on those approaching in what he described as a “limited response.”

Hamas rejected the IDF’s account, citing “undeniable” evidence of “direct firing at citizens, including headshots aimed at immediate killing”.

The incident came hours before Gaza’s health ministry announced that more than 30,000 people, including 21,000 children and women, had been killed in Gaza since the start of the current conflict on 7 October. Some 7,000 were missing and 70,450 were injured, it said.

Mr Gutteres added: “I am appalled by the tragic human toll of the conflict in Gaza – more than 30,000 people reportedly killed and over 70,000 injured.

“I reiterate my call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the unconditional release of all hostages.”

The executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in the UK, Natalie Roberts, said delivering aid to a starving population without adequate security was risking disaster. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she said: “We know that there have been very few aid convoys in the last weeks in the north, people have been unable to get anything to eat.

“We know from our own colleagues that they’re having to eat animal food, that they go without food for days on end sometimes. And so people are just completely desperate, and the minute you start trying to deliver food to the region without any sort of security for the convoy, then this was always going to happen.”

The UN is warning of a looming famine in the north of the territory, where an estimated 300,000 people are living with little food or clean water.

Israeli military launched a large-scale air and ground campaign to destroy Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the UK and others – after its gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on 7 October and took 253 back to Gaza as hostages.

"This is the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen."@melanie_ward speaks with @IsaCNN about the catastrophic levels of hunger that Israel's blockade is causing in Gaza pic.twitter.com/FthwccFEBG

— Medical Aid for Palestinians (@MedicalAidPal) February 29, 2024

LPHR statement on 110-plus starving Palestinians killed whilst seeking food to survive, 01 March 2024

The 110-plus starving Palestinian civilians killed yesterday, whilst desperately seeking food for their survival, exemplifies a devastating conflict that is scarring humanity and must end now.

This mass atrocity is added to other clearly apparent atrocity crimes perpetrated by the conflict parties since 7 October, including:

• Plausible genocide (as found by the International Court of Justice);
• The crime against humanity of murder;
• The crime against humanity of sexual violence;
• The crime against humanity of persecution (as found by an eminent team of legal experts);
• The crime against humanity of extermination;
• The crime against humanity of other inhumane acts;
• The crime against humanity of torture;
• The crime against humanity of forcible transfer;
• The substantial risk of the crime against humanity of deportation;
• The war crime of hostage-taking;
• The war crime of starvation of civilians;
• Mass unlawful killing and maiming of civilians through indiscriminate and/or
  disproportionate targeting of civilian objects;
• Making medical units the object of attack;
• Launching indiscriminate attacks;
• Extensive, unlawful and wanton destruction of civilian property and infrastructure.

Against this unspeakable context, the UK Government should do better than stubbornly maintaining its convoluted phrasing around seeking an ‘immediate pause’, rather than an ‘immediate ceasefire’.

Language matters. Calling for a ‘pause’ in response to a context of widespread and systematic violations of international humanitarian law, clearly amounting to atrocity crimes, is in effect providing tacit acquiescence that such unlawful conduct can resume in the future.

Common Article 1 to the Geneva Conventions and customary international law places a fundamental legal obligation on all States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law. Has the UK Government acted in full conformity with this core obligation – which includes preventing violations of international humanitarian law – by steadfastly calling for an ‘immediate pause’?

Yesterday’s latest atrocity in Gaza should be a defining moment for the UK Government to demonstrate humility, responsible judgement, and now act in full adherence with its legal obligation to ensure respect for international humanitarian law: it must at last call and work for an immediate ceasefire.

Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children

New York Times, 29th February 2024

Some extracts:

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of the pediatric department of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said this month he was seeing a number of deaths among children, especially newborns. “Signs of weakness and paleness are apparent on newborns because the mother is malnourished,” he said.

Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance. The hunger in Gaza is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information. Relief organizations in Gaza struggle to figure out whether the crisis has crossed formally into famine; statistically, the clearest indication is that at least two people out of every 10,000 die every day from starvation. They measure the circumference of children’s upper arms to document the peril of their weight loss.

These children are not suffering from drought or crop failure or some other natural disaster. Their hunger is a man-made catastrophe. The Israeli government has slowed and even prevented food aid from entering the besieged Gaza Strip. Even when trucks do get through, Israeli bombardment and, more recently, the growing desperation of hungry mobs have turned food distribution into an arduous and sometimes deadly endeavor.

To a lesser but important extent, people in Gaza are hungry because the U.S. government — Israel’s pre-eminent military aid provider and political defender — has failed to use its considerable leverage to force Israel to let Gaza eat.

…

Michael Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, put it bluntly: “This is a population that is starving to death.”

We should not pretend these deaths were inevitable. All of this we already knew: Palestinian residents of Gaza have been reduced to eating grass. They drink fetid water. Grains meant for animal feed are pulverized into makeshift flour, but even that lowly sustenance has been running out. Palestinian starvation has been documented and reported. We knew.

It is a harsh death. Muscles weaken and shrink. The immune system falters, and infections take hold. Vital organs break down. The weakest die first — babies, the elderly, the sick.

In the early days of its onslaught, Israel’s defense minister declared that food, electricity and fuel would be cut off to Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants, nearly half of whom are children. Israel eventually began allowing some food and medical supplies to enter, but aid organizations warned it wasn’t enough.

…

The ominous absurdity of the situation is impossible to overstate. A freighter with food bound for Gaza, enough to feed more than one million people, languished for weeks at the Israeli port of Ashdod because Israeli customs authorities refused to process the food. The United States paid for 90,000 metric tons of flour on the freighter, and President Biden thanked Israel for letting it pass — except that Israel had done the opposite.

…

“After the I.C.J. resolution, people expected that aid would enter in bigger quantities,” said Ammar Al-Dwaik, the director general of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights. “But what is happening is the opposite.”