UNRWA president says that denying food to Gaza is the “weapon of war”

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

The Palestinian colleagues trapped in Gaza do this, and are still invaluable reports of a great danger to themselves. More than 200 of their jobs were killed.

Israel does not allow international journalists to enter Gaza.

The opportunity to report eyewitnesses – one of the best function tools – we can study, from a distance, has rejected the evaluation of relief organizations operating in Gaza.

Pascal Hond, Deputy Director of Operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross last week, said that civilians in Gaza faced “a landslide daily conflict to survive the dangers of hostilities, deal with uncompromising displacement, and bear the consequences of deprivation of urgent humanitarian assistance.”

He added: “This position should not be allowed to escalate more.”

But it might be that, if Israel continues to dive more deeply in the war that resumed on March 18 when it broke the shooting of two months with a huge series of air strikes.

Israel had already closed the gates of Gaza. Since the beginning of March, all humanitarian aid shipments have been prevented, including food and medical supplies.

The return to the war ended with any opportunity to move to the suggested second stage of the ceasefire, which Israel and Hamas agreed to end with the release of all the remaining hostages in exchange for the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

This was unacceptable to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the nationalist religious extremists who maintained him in power.

They want to replace the Palestinians in Gaza with the Jewish settlers. They threatened to bring down the Netanyahu government if it does not return to war, and the end of Netanyahu’s political profession will bring the day of his account in Israel’s failure to prevent the girl’s enthusiasm on October 7, 2023. This may also be forced to conclude in his long trial on charges of corruption.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is now a new “intense” attack in Gaza in the days that followed that President Donald Trump ends his swing through the wealthy Arab oil Manches in the Gulf later this week.

The attack includes a plan to remove huge numbers of Palestinian civilians at the top of artillery waves, air strikes and death. “Displacement” is a cool verb. This means that families have a handful of minutes only to flee for their lives, from an area that may be hit immediately to an area that may be hit later. Hundreds of thousands have done this over and over since the war began.

Gaza was one of the most overcrowded places on the ground before the war. Israel’s plan is to force the largest possible number of gas in a small area in the south, near the ruins of the town of Rafah, which was almost completely destroyed.

Before this happens, the United Nations Humanitarian Office estimates that 70 % of Gaza is actually outside the borders of the Palestinians. Israel’s plan is Leave them in a smaller area. UN groups and leading relief groups reject Israeli allegations that Hamas is stealing and controlling the food that comes to Gaza. They have refused to cooperate with a plan that Israel and the United States dreams of, which will use private security companies, protected by the Israeli forces, to distribute basic classes.

Away from Gaza, in London, I spoke to Philip Lazarini, UNESE Commissioner -General, the United Nations that supports Palestinian refugees. He told me that he was running out of words “to describe misery and tragedy that affects people in Gaza. They were now more than two months without any help.”

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

If the words are not sufficient, look for the most reliable evaluation that depends on data for the emergency famine and food in the regular reports issued by the classification of integrated food security, or IPC. It is a joint venture by United Nations agencies, relief groups and governments that measure whether the starvation occurs.

The latest IPC updates says Gaza is close to starvation. But she says that all residents, more than two million people, are nearly half of them children, suffer from acute food insecurity. In simple English, this means that they are starving by the Israeli siege.

IPC says 470,000 Ghazan, 22 % of the population, in a classification he calls “stage 5 – disaster”. IPC defines it as a condition “at least one in five families suffering from a severe food shortage and face hunger that leads to want, and very critical levels of acute malnutrition and death.”

In practical terms, the fifth -stage classification of IPC is estimated that “71,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers will need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition.”

Thousands of tons of food, medical assistance and humanitarian supplies they need are sitting just a few miles away, on the other side of the border in Egypt.

In London, I asked Mr. Lazzarini whether he agreed with those who accused Israel depriving food and humanitarian aid to civilians as a war weapon.

He said: “I have no doubt at all, that this is what we have seen during this past 19 months, especially during this past two months. This is a war crime. The quantitative measurement of the International Court of Justice (the International Court of Justice) will not come from me, but what I can say, and what we see, what we notice, and humanitarian assistance is already used to meet the political or military goal in the face of GAZA.”

I asked Mr. Lazzarini if ​​the siege, in addition to a year and a half of war and destruction, may reach genocide. This is the accusation against Israel, which South Africa and other countries in the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

“Listen, with any account, that the destruction is enormous.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz did not hide Israel’s tactics. Last month, Katz said that the siege was the “main pressure crane” to secure victory over Hamas and to get all the hostages. National Security Minister Etamar Bin Ghaffir approved. He wrote that: “Stopping humanitarian aid is one of the main wheels to pressure Hamas. The return of aid to Gaza before Hamas gets its knees and the publications of all our hostages will be a historical error.”

Netanyahu plans for another attack, the observations made by Katz and Ben Ghafir and other terrifying Israeli families with the hostages are still inside Gaza. Minister Katz said that the hostage and missing families forum, which represents many of them, pays “illusion … Israel chooses to seize lands before the hostages.”

The defected Israeli military reserves also protested, saying that they had to fight again, not for Israeli security, but for the political survival of the Israeli government. In the Air Force Reserve, 1,200 pilots signed an open speech saying that the prolongation of the war mainly served “political and personal interests, not security.” Netanyahu blames a small group of “bad apple” in the open message.

For several months, Netanyahu and his government, Mr. Lazarini, accused. One of the official reports published on the Internet in January this year was “dismantling the liar of the president of Lazzarini to Anzarini.” He claimed that “he made false statements that were strongly misled by the general debate on this issue.” Israel says that UNRWA has been hacked and exploited by Hamas. She says that some UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 attacks.

Mr. Lazzzarini denies the personal accusations against Israel and a broader direction aimed at UNRWA. He says that UNRWA has achieved 19 employees he called Israel and concluded that nine of them may have an issue to answer. All 19 have been suspended. Mr. Lazzzarini said that since then UNRWA received “hundreds of allegations from the state of Israel. Every time, as a bases -based organization, we continue to request round information.” He said they had never received her.

All wars are political, and nothing more than that between Israel and the Palestinians. The war is involved and exposed to the outside world as well as the warrior.

Israel argues that self -defense has justified its actions since October 7, 2023 when Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others, attacked about 1,200 people, most of them Israeli civilians, and took 251 others as hostages. Any other government, as you say, would have done the same.

The Palestinians and the choir of anxiety and anxiety, including some of the main European allies in Israel, say that this does not justify the continuation of the most destructive attack on the Palestinians since the 1948 war, when Israel has gained its independence, which the Palestinians call the “catastrophe.”

Even President Trump shows signs of moving away from Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that the people of Gaza should be fed.

The claim that denying the full food of civilians in Ghazan is more evidence of Israeli collective genocide against the Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu angered, his government, and many Israeli citizens. It produced a rare political unit in Israel. Opposition leader Yer Lapid, a strict critic of Netanyahu, has condemned a “moral collapse and moral catastrophe” in the International Court of Justice.

Genocide is defined as destroying, completely or partially, for a national, ethnic, racist or religious group. The International Criminal Court, a separate body, issued arrest orders in favor of Netanyahu and the former defense minister on charges of war crimes, which they reject. The three Hamas leaders who were also the subject of the orders of the International Criminal Court were all killed by Israel.

It is not too early to think about affecting the long term of this devastating war, although its end is not on the horizon. Mr. Lazzarini told me that in the coming years we will realize how wrong we were … on the wrong side of history. We have under our watch, let’s reveal the enormous atrocities. “

He said that, with Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7: “The biggest killing of Israeli Israel and Jews in the region since World War II” was followed by a “huge” military response by Israel.

He said that it was “inconsistent, which leads mainly to reporting the entire population in their homeland … I think there is a collective responsibility from the international community, the level, the negative, and the indifference that is shown so far, the absence of political, diplomatic work, and I mean, which is brutal at all, especially in our countries where I said” never less. “

The introduction may be attempt to realize Donald Trump’s dangerous imagination in Gaza as Dubai for the Mediterranean, and it was rebuilt and owned by America and without Palestinians. It has given a form of the dreams of Israeli extremists threatening to remove the Palestinians from the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Whatever waiting for us, peace will not be.