Thousands of Palestinians flock to seek food aid at the Zikim border crossing between Israel and the northern Gaza strip. Acute hunger threatens hundreds of thousands of people in the Gaza Strip. United Nations human rights experts have concluded that Israel is committing genocide. Photo: UN

By IPS

HAVANA TIMES  – In statements issued on Thursday, August 7, two groups of United Nations human rights experts affirmed that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. They called on the world’s nations to act to restore humanitarian assistance to the starving population of the Gaza Strip.

Israel “is exterminating the population of Gaza by all means,” stated a first group of experts, citing as an example that “more than 1,000 Palestinians have been massacred by Israeli forces while waiting for humanitarian aid.”

They explained that “70% of these killings have taken place in locations established by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by the United States and Israel” to deliver food at a very limited number of sites, months after blocking access to food and other aid delivered by UN agencies.

These deaths “add to the more than 59,000 Palestinians killed and 140,000 wounded during Israel’s indiscriminate attack on Gaza,” declared this first group of independent experts, appointed by the 47-member UN Human Rights Council based in the Swiss city of Geneva.

Most of Gaza’s structures have been destroyed or rendered unusable by the 21-month military assault on the entire population of the besieged area. Israel has justified its indiscriminate attack as a response to the attack carried out in the south of Israel on October 7, 2023, by the Islamist militia Hamas, which killed some 1,200 people and the kidnapped another 250, of which fifty still remain dead or captive.

Meanwhile, most of the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza—a 365-square-kilometer strip on the eastern Mediterranean coast—have been forced to flee their homes, seeking refuge in camps or the ruins of buildings. Experts warned that displacement orders issued by the Israeli army have confined the entire surviving population of Gaza to a mere 12% of the Strip’s territory.

For months, hunger has plagued the population, with hundreds of thousands of children and adults in a state of acute food insecurity, including health and humanitarian workers. Dozens of people have died as a result of malnutrition.

The UNHRC group stated: “Israeli proposals to continue forcibly transferring the population of Gaza to a so-called ‘humanitarian city’ on the border with Egypt can only be seen as an attempt to create a concentration camp with conditions so extreme that the inhabitants will be forced to leave their homeland.” The experts urged the international community to take long-awaited measures to protect Palestinians and hold Israel accountable.

The experts group consisted of: Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons; George Katrougalos, Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order; Michael Fakhri, Rapporteur on the right to food; Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation; and Francesca Albanese, Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.

They noted that “the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people is facilitated by the complicity of States that continue to shield Israel from the political and diplomatic consequences of its actions,” while some governments “opt instead for suppressing the free expression of its citizens who manifest opposition to these horrendous crimes, at the same time they continue supplying Israel with arms, trade and economic assistance.”

“Without urgent international action, the words ‘never again’ will refer not to the prevention of genocide, but to the existence of Palestinian life in Gaza,” they concluded.

A second statement was issued some 20 experts, independent rapporteurs, and working groups specializing in different areas of human rights, all acting under the mandate of the Human Rights Council.

The group insisted that, to prevent further deaths and brutal suffering from starvation, Israel must immediately restore unimpeded access to Gaza for impartial humanitarian organizations, in particular the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

More than 500,000 people—a quarter of Gaza’s population—are facing starvation, and the rest are suffering from rampant hunger. The 320,000 children under the age of five are at risk of acute malnutrition, with serious lifelong consequences for their physical and mental health.

Famine “has been used as a brutal weapon of war and constitutes a crime under international law,” the experts said.

They condemned in particular two Israeli laws that prohibit that country’s cooperation with UNRWA and hinder the work and free movement of its 17,000 employees, as well as disrupting the entity’s finances, the movement of goods and vehicles, and its facilities.

The world’s countries “must do everything possible to restore the UN humanitarian system in Gaza, act decisively to prevent Israel from destroying living conditions in the Strip, and put an end to its endless war against humanity,” the group urged.

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