The bodies of victims of the October 31, 2023 Israeli bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip are lined up outside the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City. (Photo: Fadi Alwhidi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure.”
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday published a draft report that found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.
The advance unedited version of the report—entitled Anatomy of a Genocide—concludes that Israel’s far-right government and military “have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.”
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” the draft report states, enumerating Israeli actions that violate Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “Killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
“Israel has de facto treated an entire protected group and its life-sustaining infrastructure as ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist-supporting,’ thus transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable,” the paper continues. “In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition. This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying the fabric of life in Gaza, and causing irreparable harm to its entire population.”
As the UNSC finally passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in #Gaza, the UN special rapporteur @FranceskAlbs's sobering new report lands:
Israel rejected the report as “an obscene inversion of reality.”
According to Palestinian and international humanitarian officials, Israel’s 171-day Gaza onslaught has killed at least 32,333 Palestinians, most of them women and children, while wounding nearly 75,000 others and displacing around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people. Thousands more Palestinians are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings. Disease and deadly starvation caused and exacerbated by Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza are spreading rapidly.
“Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure,” the draft report asserts. “For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group—demographically, culturally, economically, and politically—seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.”
Referring to the flight and ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, the paper contends that “the ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all. This is an imperative owed to the victims of this highly preventable tragedy, and to future generations in that land.”
“The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all.”
The draft report urges U.N. member states to “enforce the prohibition of genocide in accordance with their… obligations” under international law. In January, the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that Israel was “plausibly” perpetrating genocide in Gaza and ordered the country’s government to “take all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts. Human rights defenders say Israel has ignored the order.
“Israel and those states that have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide must be held accountable and deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death, and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people,” the publication argues.
The draft report recommends measures including:
Immediate implementation of an arms embargo on Israel, as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ;
Immediate referral of the situation in Palestine to the International Criminal Court in support of its ongoing investigation;
Ensuring that Israel, as well as states who have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, acknowledge the colossal harm done, commit to nonrepetition, with measures for prevention and full reparations, including the full cost of the reconstruction of Gaza;
Deploying an international protective presence to constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied territories; and
Ensuring that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is properly funded to enable it to meet the increased needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel on Monday informed the U.N. that it will no longer allow UNRWA convoys carrying food aid into northern Gaza, even as the Palestinians are starving to death, a move that one humanitarian campaigner called a “death sentence.”
United Nations workers and volunteers unload aid from a truck at a school housing displaced Palestinians on the 29th day of fighting between Israel and the armed Palestinian factions in Khan Yunis on November 8, 2023. (Photo: Ahmed Zakot/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“By preventing UNRWA to fulfill its mandate in Gaza, the clock will tick faster toward famine and many more will die of hunger, dehydration, and lack of shelter,” UNRWA’s commissioner-general said.
Israel will no longer permit the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East to drive convoys bearing food aid into northern Gaza, even as the area is on the brink of famine.
Israeli officials informed the U.N. of the new restrictions on Sunday, prompting outrage and dire warnings from U.N. officials and other human rights advocates.
“By preventing UNRWA to fulfill its mandate in Gaza, the clock will tick faster toward famine and many more will die of hunger, dehydration, and lack of shelter,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini posted on social media. “This cannot happen, it would only stain our collective humanity.”
“I have urged Israel to lift all impediments on aid to Gaza. Now this—MORE impediments.”
In his response, Lazzarini said that UNRWA was the largest organization operating in Gaza with the greatest capability to distribute aid.
“This is outrageous and makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine,” Lazzarini said. “These restrictions must be lifted.”
The news comes as medical workers and international aid organizations have sounded the alarm about famine in Gaza. At least 23 children in northern Gaza have already died from starvation or dehydration, and one-third of children under two years old suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the United Nations’ International Children’s Emergency Fund. A new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report published on March 18 found that famine was “imminent” in Gaza’s northern governorates and likely to begin “anytime” between the report’s publication and May. In the northern governorates, where around 300,000 live, almost two-thirds of households endured at least 10 days and nights when they did not eat at all in the last 30 days.
“Blocking UNRWA from delivering food is in fact denying starving people the ability to survive,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media. “This decision must be urgently reversed. The levels of hunger are acute. All efforts to deliver food should not only be permitted but there should be an immediate acceleration of food deliveries.”
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths also called for Israel’s decision to be “revoked.”
“I have urged Israel to lift all impediments on aid to Gaza. Now this—MORE impediments,” Griffiths posted on social media, calling UNRWA the “beating heart of the humanitarian response in Gaza.”
UNRWA Communications Director Juliette Touma told BBC World on Monday that a quarter of a million people in the north rely on UNRWA food aid, yet the agency has not been able to deliver to them in two months. An attempt on February 5 had to turn back after the Israeli Navy fired on an aid convoy even as it traveled along a pre-approved route.
Touma told BBC World that more than 1 million people in Gaza now live in UNRWA shelters.
“They lost everything, and they need everything,” Touma said.
Touma added that the most important commodity people in Gaza need is food, but they also need “safety, and they need protection, above all, and a cease-fire, which is very, very much overdue.”
The U.N. Security Council finally succeeded in passing a resolution on Monday calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and the release of all hostages as the U.S. abstained from the vote.
Outside the U.N., former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said on social media that the food aid decision showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “starvation strategy at work,” as well as his “vendetta against Palestinian refugees.”
CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians Melanie Ward also decried Israel’s decision to permanently block UNRWA convoys from the north.
“This would be a death sentence for thousands,” Ward said on social media. “They cannot be allowed to do this.”
Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.
Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza.
Linguistic gymnastics
This New York Times headline (2/29/24) was described as “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.”
On the day of the massacre, the New York Times (2/29/24) published this contrivance:
“As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll”
It was met with ridicule as it slid across online platforms. Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/1/24), author and research director at the Iranian American Council, called the piece of work “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.”
Another Times headline (2/29/24) read, “Deaths of Gazans Hungry for Food Prompt Fresh Calls for Ceasefire.” Nima Shirazi, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed (Twitter, 3/1/24), noted that “the New York Times just can’t bring itself to write clear headlines when Israeli war crimes are involved.” Shirazi offered this revision: “Israel Slaughters Starving People as It Continues Committing Genocide.”
Professor Jason Hickel (Twitter, 2/29/24), along with Mint Press‘s Alan MacLeod (2/29/24), flagged the use of the neologism “food aid–related deaths” when it turned up in a Guardian headline (2/29/24): “Biden Says Gaza Food Aid–Related Deaths Complicate Ceasefire Talks.” MacLeod noted, “Virtually the entire Western media pretend they don’t know who just carried out a massacre of 100+ starving civilians.”
Linguistic gymnastics—a longstanding plague pervading Western media coverage of Palestine (FAIR.org, 8/22/23)—were so popular in news headlines and reporting that Caitlin Johnstone (Consortium News, 3/1/24) compiled a list of them, adding “chaotic incident” (CNN, 2/29/24) and “chaotic aid delivery turns deadly” (Washington Post, 2/29/24) to those already mentioned.
Sana Saeed, media critic for Al Jazeera, decoded the latter kind of construction for AJ+ (3/29/24), arguing that such passive language has been used “consistently to sanitize the violence that a powerful state is unleashing against civilian populations.”
As the genocide enters its sixth month, media analysts, investigative reporters and social media users have become adept at recognizing pro-Israeli contortions and patterns of language that justify Israel’s war on Gaza. This has become an essential aspect in exposing Israel’s genocide.
‘Anarchy rules in Gaza’
Economist (2/29/24): “As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas, the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.”
The Economist (2/29/24), under the headline, “A New Tragedy Shows Anarchy Rules in Gaza: A Shooting and Stampede Kill 122 and Injure Hundreds,” went into the worst pro-Israel spin, with reporting that seemed to blame Palestinians for their own murders. Parroting Israeli press directives, the piece claimed Palestinians were killed by “trampling” each other in their own “stampede.”
The piece was written in literary prose: “Death descended on a coastal road in Gaza,” the reporter (not present at the scene) wrote. Then “catastrophe befell an aid convoy,” as if it merely happened upon bad luck.
Then the writer made a prediction: “As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas, the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.” That’s likely to come true, especially when major media outlets abdicate their responsibility for evaluating claims.
Timeline of changing denials
Even in special “Verify” mode, the BBC (3/1/24) can’t bring itself to say in a headline who it was that killed Gazans.
Many other writers and journalists have documented the string of vacillating Israeli statements that help explain the contorted reporting. Al Jazeera reporter Willem Marx (Twitter, 3/1/24) traced a timeline of how the Israeli military changed its story over the course of the day.
The IDF began by claiming there had been trampling and pushing that led to injuries around the aid truck. Then, hungry Palestinians had “threatened their soldiers,” or “appeared in a threatening manner,” so the IDF shot at them. Later that day, Israeli officials claimed there were two separate incidents, one that involved trampling and the other that led to shooting. By the end of the day, they alleged only to have provided support to a humanitarian convoy, and that no shots were fired at all by the military.
When the BBC (3/1/24) verified that a video released by the Israeli military exhibited four unexplained breaks in the footage and was therefore invalid, the outlet still used the passive voice, referring in the headline to “Gazans Killed Around Aid Convoy.” One sentence of the detailed, confused article quoted Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Awadeyah: “Israelis purposefully fired at the men…. They were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour.” Earlier, however, Awadeyah was problematized when identified “as a journalist for Al Mayadeen, a Lebanon-based news station whose broadcasts are sympathetic to groups fighting Israel.”
Independent and international media
“Israel’s use of food as a weapon of war reaches new heights,” Mondoweiss (3/4/24) reported.
If we compare corporate outlets to independent media, in which reporting was based on ground sources, humanitarian actors and aid workers, we find very different content.
Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul (2/29/24), who was at the scene of the massacre, said that “after opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies. It is a massacre, on top of the starvation threatening citizens in Gaza.”
EuroMed staff (2/29/24) on the scene confirmed that the Israeli military had fired on starving Palestinians. EuroMed’s findings were summarized in a videotape by Palestinian news agency Quds News Network and posted by the Palestine Information Center (3/4/24).
Mondoweiss (3/4/24) reported details of the massacre from eyewitness accounts. One survivor recounted how an Israeli checkpoint “split the crowd in two,” preventing those who had entered the checkpoint from passing back to the northern side. Then Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowd. International observers visited the injured survivors at al-Shifa’ Hospital, “confirming that the majority of wounds from the hundreds of injured people were due to live ammunition.”
In context of famine
Middle East Eye (2/29/24) put IDF claims in the context of a Gaza “on the brink of famine as a result of the Israeli blockade.”
Reporting in the alternative press also placed the massacre within the context of the rapidly increasing famine in Gaza.
The headline for the Electronic Intifada (2/29/24) read, “Palestinians Seeking Food Aid Killed as Israel Starves Gaza.” The outlet said an “engineered famine has taken hold in Gaza, with people resorting to eating wild plants with little nutritional value and animal feed to survive.”
Middle East Eye’s reporting (2/29/24) included the dire condition Palestinians are currently facing: “Much of Gaza’s population is on the brink of famine as a result of the Israeli blockade, according to the UN and other humanitarian organizations.”
The day of the massacre, Democracy Now! (2/29/24) opened its broadcast with a clear statement and the relevant context: “Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as UN Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza.” Its first guest, UN special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri, said, “Every single person in Gaza is hungry.” He accused Israel of the war crime of intentional starvation. He emphasized that famine in the modern context is a human-made catastrophe:
At this point I’m running out of words to be able to describe the horror of what’s happening and how vile the actions have been by Israel against the Palestinian civilians.
Common Dreams (3/3/24) reported on Israel’s obstruction of aid convoys, and cited UNICEF on the deaths of children who
died of starvation and dehydration at a hospital in northern Gaza as Israeli forces continue to obstruct and attack aid convoys, fueling desperation across the territory…. People are hungry, exhausted and traumatized. Many are clinging to life.
It concluded, “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.”
In the days before the massacre, numerous outlets had been documenting the growing famine looming over Gaza. This is the material independent media made use of for contextualizing the massacre.
The New York Times, on the other hand, put the massacre into an entirely different context. A piece (3/2/24) headlined “Disastrous Convey Was Part of New Israeli Effort for More Aid in Gaza,” cited as confirmation “Western diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” It said that international aid groups “suspended operations” because of “rising lawlessness,” as well as Israel’s refusal to “greenlight aid trucks.” It blamed starving Gazans by claiming that aid convoys had been looted either by “civilians fearing starvation” or by “organized gangs.”
‘How is this not a bigger story?’
“How is this not a bigger story?” one observer asked of this Al Jazeera report (3/6/24).
As Common Dreams and Mondoweiss reported, the flour massacre was not the first time the IDF killed starving Palestinians, and it would not be the last. As Mondoweiss (3/4/24) put it: “In less than a week, Israel has committed several massacres against the hungry. On Sunday, March 3, Israel bombed an aid convoy, killing seven people.”
Quds News Network (3/2/24) reported that Israel targeted hungry civilians again at Al Rasheed Street in northern Gaza while they were waiting for humanitarian aid. And Quds (3/4/24) reposted Al Jazeera footage that captured the moments when Israel’s military opened fire at other hungry Gazans, this time at the Al Kuwait roundabout, as they looked for food aid.
Al Jazeera (3/6/24) continues to document the murders of Palestinians desperate for aid as they come under Israeli fire. On a longer videotape, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch says these attacks violate ICJ orders:
The idea that these people are being killed as they scavenge for meager rations of food is just appalling, and is a reminder why there must be international immediate action to prevent further mass atrocities.
Following the Al Jazeera report, Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/6/24) expressed dismay:
Israeli attacks on Palestinians waiting for or attempting to get aid have repeatedly happened this week, yet there has been no media coverage since the massacre that killed over 100 people. Israel is attacking civilians it’s deliberately starving. How is this not a bigger story?
Normalizing starvation and massacres
The Floutist (11/16/23) addresses “the perversion of language that the defense of Israel’s violence requires.”
So just to be clear: Much like how Israel normalized attacking and destroying hospitals, and it was accepted by the international community, Israel is now normalizing shooting and killing the people it is starving as they seek food.
Media have failed to inform the US public on the horrific conditions experienced by starving civilians in Gaza. They blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, covering for the Israeli military as it carried out a massacre. They further dehumanized Palestinians by characterizing starving people as an unruly mob who trampled one another.
To paraphrase Patrick Lawrence (Floutist, 11/16/23) on the distortion of language in defense of Israel’s violence against Palestinians: It corrupts our public discourse, our public space, and altogether our ability to think clearly. This corruption is as vital as US bombs to the Israeli genocide against Palestine: Without these verbal distortions that justify, distract, deny and consume corporate information spaces, the genocide could not be carried out.
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U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) pleads for a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel during a March 22, 2024 speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/YouTube screen grab)
“The time is now to force compliance with U.S. law and the standards of humanity.”
Progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the House floor Friday to demand a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel as it wages a genocidal war on Gaza and deliberately starves Palestinians to death in the besieged enclave.
“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door. A famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said during her speech. “This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated following the killing of another 30,000, 70% of whom were women and children.”
“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes,” she continued. “It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away. It looks like good and decent people who do nothing. Or too little. Too late.”
“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door.”
Noting that much of the death and devastation in Gaza was “accomplished with U.S. resources and weapons,” the congresswoman pointed out that “it is against United States law to provide weapons to forces who block United States humanitarian assistance.”
“That is exactly what is happening right now,” she said. “So much so that the president himself stated, during the State of the Union, that the United States must and will be building its own port to let aid through. It will be too late.”
“The time is now to force compliance with U.S. law and the standards of humanity,” the lawmaker asserted. “And fulfill our obligations to the American people to suspend the transfer of U.S. weapons to the Israeli government in order to stop and prevent further atrocity.”
There is no world in which the forced famine of 1.1 million people cannot be considered genocide. And that is exactly what we are watching unfold in Gaza now.
We must enforce U.S. laws and halt weapons transfers to the Israeli government to stop an atrocity in the making. pic.twitter.com/N40Jk3yKc7
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) March 22, 2024
Ocasio-Cortez related that “a decent man” once said: “‘Preventing genocide is an achievable goal, a goal that requires a level of government organization and engagement that matches in its intensity the brutality and efficiency required to carry out mass killing. Too often, these efforts have come too late, after the best and least costly opportunities to prevent them have been missed.'”
“The man who said that was then-Vice President and now President Joseph Biden,” she revealed. “And he was right.”
Ocasio-Cortez was referring to a 2011 speech during which Biden told an audience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that “when a state engages in atrocity, it forfeits its sovereignty.”
This, as U.S. troops were committing atrocities while violating the sovereignty of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as the Obama administration continued and expanded the so-called War on Terror launched after 9/11 by then-President George W. Bush.
“This is not just about Israel or Gaza. This is about us,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “The world will never be the same. And we will never be the same. And we must write our story in this moment, of what it means and who we are as Americans. And our story must be not that we were good men who did nothing. But that we were a committed democracy that did something.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s plea came as her House colleagues voted 286-134 on Friday to extend U.S. sanctions on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) until March 2025, while authorizing another $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel. Ocasio-Cortez was one of just 22 House Democrats to vote against the measure, which also authorizes more than $1 trillion in spending on U.S. militarization.
Responding to unfounded Israeli claims—reportedly resulting from torture—that 12 of UNRWA’s more than 13,000 workers in Gaza took part in the October 7 attacks on Israel, the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries suspended funding for the lifesaving agency, even as famine loomed amid Israel’s relentless bombardment and siege. Numerous nations have since reinstated financing for UNRWA, most recently Finland on Friday.
The Biden administration—which is seeking an additional $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel—continues to support the country’s war on Gaza even as evidence mounts that the key ally is violating an International Court of Justice order to avoid genocidal acts. However, the administration has ramped up its criticism of Israeli war crimes, with Biden imploring the Israel Defense Forces to stop its “indiscriminate bombing” of civilians and Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week asserting that “children should not be dying of malnutrition in Gaza.”
“It’s time for the president to bring real leverage to bear, in accordance with existing U.S. law, and suspend military assistance to Israel.”
But they are dying, and critics say U.S. humanitarian airdrops and construction of an aid port are essentially meaningless as long as Washington also continues to back Israel’s genocidal onslaught. And now the world is watching as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his far-right government vow to invade Rafah, where around 1.5 million Palestinians—the vast majority of them refugees forcibly expelled from other parts of Gaza—are sheltering.
“The Biden administration has rightly been sounding the alarm about the threatened Israeli incursion into Rafah, and the looming famine resulting from Israel’s indiscriminate war on Gaza,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. “But the devastating last five months have shown the limits of the power of words.”
“It’s time for the president to bring real leverage to bear, in accordance with existing U.S. law, and suspend military assistance to Israel,” Duss added. “We applaud Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s courageous call today for President Biden to do that.”
Palestinian children in Rafah, Gaza gather to receive food distributed by aid organizations on March 15, 2024. (Photo: Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“There is an indisputable, man-made, intentional deprivation of aid that continues to suck the life out of any and all humanitarian operations, including our own,” said one campaigner.
The Israeli government is intentionally restricting the flow of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip by subjecting shipments to a prolonged and dysfunctional inspection process, arbitrarily rejecting items, attacking aid convoys, and limiting the number of crossings through which deliveries can pass, Oxfam International said in a report published late Sunday.
The report, titled Inflicting Unprecedented Suffering and Destruction, argues that Israel’s continued obstruction of humanitarian aid is a direct violation of both international humanitarian law (IHL) and a January order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled the Israeli government is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and must ensure that assistance reaches desperate Gazans.
Oxfam said Sunday that “humanitarian access in the Gaza Strip has effectively worsened” since the ICJ handed down its interim order nearly two months ago, and conditions on the ground in the Palestinian territory have deteriorated rapidly. New data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) shows that Gaza’s “entire population” is facing “high levels of acute food insecurity” and 1.1 million people are experiencing “catastrophic” hunger—a figure that one expert called “unprecedented.”
“The ICJ order should have shocked Israeli leaders to change course, but since then conditions in Gaza have actually worsened,” said Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa director. “The fact that other governments have not challenged Israel hard enough, but instead turned to less effective methods like airdrops and maritime corridors is a huge red flag, signaling that Israel continues to deny the full potential of better ways to deliver more aid.”
“Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort but are actively hindering it,” Abi Khalil added. “We believe that Israel is failing to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide.”
In its new report, Oxfam outlines seven ways in which the Israeli government is impeding humanitarian aid shipments and exacerbating one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in modern history:
In February—the first full month after the ICJ’s order—Israel allowed just 2,874 aid trucks to enter the Gaza Strip, a 44% decline compared to the previous month, according to Oxfam.
The group said Israeli authorities “have rejected a warehouse full of international aid including oxygen, incubators, and Oxfam water and sanitation gear, all of which is now stockpiled at Al Arish just 40 kilometers away from the border of 2.3 million desperate Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel’s military, which is armed by the U.S. and other major countries that are legally obligated to prevent genocide, has also blocked humanitarian staff from entering Gaza, adding “pressure and workload” to already overwhelmed aid efforts, Oxfam said.
Celine Maayeh, advocacy and research officer at Juzoor for Health and Social Development—an Oxfam partner organization—said Sunday that “there’s been an alarming increase in cases of malnutrition among children in the last month, and yet the only food the team is able to find to feed people living in 45 shelters is some vegetables.”
“There is an indisputable, man-made, intentional deprivation of aid that continues to suck the life out of any and all humanitarian operations, including our own,” said Maayeh.
“If a famine is declared, it will already be too late for too many people—children are famine’s first victims and are already dying in Gaza because of malnutrition.”
Oxfam’s findings are consistent with those of other aid organizations and lawmakers who have visited the region in recent weeks.
In January, U.S. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told reporters that they witnessed “miles of backed-up trucks” stuck at border crossings as Gazans nearby struggled to survive, eating grass and drinking contaminated water.
The senators said they saw one warehouse full of items that Israeli authorities rejected in their inspection process, including oxygen cylinders and medical kits used for delivering babies.
Van Hollen said the warehouse was “a testament to the arbitrariness” of Israel’s inspections.
Oxfam argued Sunday that the “only meaningful solution” to Gaza’s intensifying humanitarian emergency is “an immediate, permanent, and unconditional cease-fire.”
“Even the trickle of aid that a humanitarian response could provide under the current circumstances is being further obstructed by Israel’s policies and practices, inflicting suffering on millions of Palestinians who are living under Israeli bombardment without access to food, clean water, and medical care,” the group said.
Xavier Joubert, country director for Save the Children in the occupied Palestinian territory, echoed Oxfam’s call for a cease-fire and warned in response to the new IPC figures that “we have a clear timeframe to stave off famine, and it demands urgency.”
“If a famine is declared, it will already be too late for too many people—children are famine’s first victims and are already dying in Gaza because of malnutrition,” said Joubert. “Every minute counts for them. It should be on the collective conscience of Israeli authorities and the international community that every day without an immediate, definitive cease-fire and unfettered access for and to humanitarian aid is another catastrophic day of starvation and suffering, another step towards famine, and another death knell for Gaza’s children.”
