Israel denying Gaza’s food is a “weapon of war,” says UNRA chief

How do you measure misery? For journalists, the usual way is to see it, to feel it, to smell it.

The dressed Palestinian colleagues in Gaza do this, still do invaluable accounting for a great risk for themselves. More than 200 were killed by doing their job.

Israel does not allow international journalists in Gaza.

He denied the chance of eyewitness accounting – one of the best tools of the work – we can explore from a distance the grades of the assistance organizations working in Gaza.

Pascal Hund, deputy director of operations in the International Red Cross Committee, said last week that civilians in Gaza collide with “a huge daily struggle to survive the dangers of hostilities, deal with relentless shift and withstand the consequences of the emergency room.”

He added: “This situation should not – and cannot – be allowed to escalate further.”

But this may, if Israel continues to immerse himself deeper into a war that resumed on March 18, when he interrupted a two-month cessation of the fire with a massive series of air strikes.

Israel had already sealed Gaza’s gates. Since the beginning of March, he has blocked all supplies of humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies.

The return to the war ended any chance of moving to the proposed second phase of the termination of the fire, which Israel and Hamas agreed to end with the release of all other hostages in exchange for a complete withdrawal of Israel from Gaza.

This was unacceptable to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ultra-nationalist religious extremists who keep him in power.

They want the Gaza Palestinians to be replaced by Jewish settlers. They threatened to overthrow Netanyahu’s government if he did not return to war, and the end of Netanyahu’s political career would bring the day of his role in Israel’s inability to prevent Hamas’s deadly attacks on October 7, 2023. This could also draw a conclusion in his long process of corruption.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is now promising a new “intensive” offensive in Gaza in the days after President Donald Trump finished his swing through the rich Arab oil monarchies in the bay later this week.

The offensive includes a plan to displace the huge number of Palestinian civilians at the top of artillery, air strikes and death. “To shift” is a cold verb. This means that families only have a handful of minutes to escape for their lives, from an area that can be hit immediately to one that can be hit later. Hundreds of thousands have done it many times since the beginning of the war.

Gaza was one of the most crossed places on Earth before the war. Israel’s plan is to force as much as possible in a tiny area to the south, near the ruins of Rafa, which is almost completely destroyed.

Before that happens, the UN Humanitarian Office estimates that 70% of gas is already effective beyond the Palestinians. Israel’s plan is yes Leave them in an even smaller area. The UN and the leading aid groups reject Israeli claims that Hamas steals and controls the food that enters Gaza. They refused to cooperate with a scheme proposed by Israel and the United States, which will use private security companies protected by Israeli troops to allocate major rations.

Far from Gaza, in London, I talked to Philip Lazarini, Unrwa Commissar General, the UN Agency that supports Palestinian refugees. He told me that he was running out of words “to describe the misery and tragedy affecting the people in Gaza. Now they have been more than two months without any help.”

“Hunger is spread, people are exhausted, people are hungry … We can expect that in the coming weeks, if no help, people will not die because of the bombing, but they will die due to the lack of food. This is the weapon of humanitarian aid.”

If the words are not sufficient, look at the most respected evaluation of emergency and food data in regular reports issued by an integrated classification of the food phase or IPC. This is a joint venture from UN agencies, help groups and governments, which measures whether hunger is happening.

The last IPC update says Gaza is close to starvation. But it is said that the whole population, more than two million people, almost half of whom are children, is experiencing acute nutritional insecurity. In ordinary English, this means that they were starving from the blockade of Israel.

IPC says 470,000 Gazani, 22% of the population, are in a classification, which is called “Phase 5 – Catastrophe”. IPC defines it as a condition in which “at least one in five households experience an exceptional lack of food and fasting of a person, leading to disaster, extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition and death.”

In practice, the classification of the Five phase, the most powerful used by IPC, estimates that “71,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers will need emergency treatment for acute malnutrition.”

Thousands of tons of foods, medical help and humanitarian supplies they need are only a few miles, on the other side of the Egypt border.

In London, I asked for Lazarini if ​​he agreed with those who accused Israel of giving up food and humanitarian aid of civilians as a weapon of war.

“I have absolutely no doubt,” he said, “that this has been witnessing in the last 19 months, especially in the last two months. It is a war crime. The quantitative determination will come from the Council of Ministers (the International Court), not from me, and what I can say, what we see, the food and the humanitarian.

I asked the Lazzarini if ​​the blockade, at the top of a year and half of the war and destruction, could be a genocide. This is the accusation against Israel, leveled by South Africa and other countries in the Council of Ministers in The Hague.

“Listen, by some story, the destruction is massive. The number of people killed is huge and certainly undervalued. We saw the systematic destruction of school, at a health center. People were constant in Gaza who move all the time. So there may be absolutely no doubt that we have many elements.

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz did not make a secret to Israel’s tactics. Last month, Katz said the blockade was a “main pressure lever” to provide a victory over Hamas and take out all the hostages. National Security Minister Itariam Ben-Gvir agreed. He wrote that: “The termination of humanitarian aid is one of the main levers of pressure on Hamas. Returning the aid to Gaza before Hamas got to his knees and release all our hostages would be a historical mistake.”

Netanyahu’s plans for another offensive and remarks made by Katz, Ben-Gvir and other, horrified Israeli families with hostages, still inside Gaza. The hostage and missing families forum, which represents many of them, said that Minister Katz pushed “Illusion … Israel chooses to seize the territory in front of the hostages.”

Israeli Israeli military reservists also protested, saying they were forced to fight again not because of Israeli security, but for the political survival of the Israeli government. In the Air Force Reserve, 1,200 pilots signed an open letter stating that the prolongation of the war serves mainly “political and personal interests, not those of security.” Netanyahu accused a small group of bad apples for the open letter.

For many months, Netanyahu and his government have also accused the lasarini of lies. An official report, published online in January this year, was the “disassembly of the lies of the chief of Unrwa Lazzarini”. He claims that he is “consistently making false statements that have misinnounced the public debate on the subject.” Unrwa, says Israel, has been infiltrated and operated by Hamas to an unprecedented degree. It says some UNRWA employees have been involved in the October 7th attacks.

Lazarini denies the personal accusations aimed at Israel and the wider, aimed at UNRWA. He says UNRWA is investigating 19 employees indicated by Israel and concluded that nine of them may have a response case. All 19 were stopped. Mr. Lazzarini said that Unrwa has since received “hundreds of statements from the State of Israel. Every time, as an organization based on rules, we continue to ask for reasonable information.” He said they had never received it.

All wars are political and no more than those between Israel and the Palestinians. The war engages and infuriates the outside world as well as the warring.

Israel claims that self -protection justified its actions of October 7, 2023, when Hamas, Islamic jihad and others attacked Israel, killed about 1,200 people, mainly Israeli civilians, and took 251 other hostages. Any other government, according to him, would do the same.

The Palestinians and an increasingly concerned and outraged choir of countries, including some of the key European allies of Israel, say that this does not justify the continuation of the most devastating attack on the Palestinians after the 1948 war, when Israel gained its independence, which the Palestinians call “disaster”.

Even President Trump shows signs of distance from Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that gas people should be fed.

The claim that the overall refusal of food of Gazan civilians is more evidence of Israeli genocide against Palestinians, outrage Benjamin Netanyahu, his government and many Israeli citizens. It rarely produces political unity in Israel. Opposition leader Jair Lapid, usually a strict critic of Netanyahu, has condemned a “moral breakdown and moral disaster” in ICJ.

The genocide is defined as destruction, in whole or in part of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The International Criminal Court (ICC), a separate authority, issued orders for the arrest of Netanyahu and his former Minister of Defense on charges of war crimes they reject. The three Hamas leaders, who were also subject to MHC orders, were all killed by Israel.

It is not too soon to think about the long -term impact of this devastating war, although its end is not visible. Lazarini told me that “in the coming years we will find out how much we were wrong … on the wrong side of the story. We have under our clock, let the massive cruelty be unfolded.”

He started, he said, with Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7: “The biggest murder of Israeli and Jews in the region after World War II” was followed by a “massive” military reaction from Israel.

According to him, it was “disproportionate, in fact it almost led to the destruction of the entire population in their homeland … I think there is collective responsibility on the part of the international community, level, passivity, indifference, the lack of political, diplomatic, economic actions. I mean it is absolutely monstrous, especially in our countries.”

Next, it may be an attempt to realize the dangerous fantasy of Donald Trump’s Gaza Gaza as Dubai of the Mediterranean, restored and owned by America and without Palestinians. He gave a form of the hidden dreams of Israeli extremists who threaten the removal of Palestinians from the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Whatever it is, it will not be peace.