The world sees the humanity of Gazans reduced to such an extent that they are now beginning to repeat their distressed appeals for help. In an ethical and sane world, no people should have to earn the right to eat.
Food is a blessing from God, and when you deny people access to it, you sin. Equally, in international law, when you do that, using food, say, as a weapon of war, you commit a war crime.
Israel’s restrictions on Gazan aid deliveries have taken the people of Gaza over the brink of famine. It has been generations since the world has seen this degree of food deprivation in war.
Gazans have had to endure a multitude of horrors, but one of them, the mass starvation, is one beyond all rational understanding, one that requires no less than a reorientation of our consciousness and of the linear metaphors around which we organize our perceptual images of the objective world.
In modern as in ancient times, there have been food crises associated with conflict, but what makes Gaza unique is the scale and speed of the destruction of those structures in the Strip that are necessary for people’s survival.
Add to that the rigor with which Israel has enforced its siege, effectively sealing the territory from the outside world, leaving its 2.4 million wretched denizens with no recourse to find food elsewhere or from having it delivered to them.
In the last 75 years, the famine caused by the enforcement of Israeli siege surpasses any other case of manufactured famines. It is a deliberate and calculated extension of Israel’s punitive policy, which includes the employment of starvation as a weapon of war.
It was a day after the war began, when Israel ordered that a complete siege be placed there, and Defense Minister Yaor Gallant, who then identified Palestinians as a bunch of human animals, called for the implementation of his four infamous ‘nos’ i.e. no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.
Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, says, “The only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force and not an ounce of humanitarian aid”. Other politicians not only echoed that grotesque call, but they also demanded to turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse.
In Gaza today, there is starvation. Yet Israeli officials continue to deny, with a straight face, that they are impeding, or in any way blocking, the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gazans. Why adopt such an improbable posture, even when the evidence points in the opposite direction?
In addition, those who cause famines, by using starvation as a weapon of war, commit, in the eyes of international law, a war crime. You see, the prohibition of the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare entered international law in 1977, with an additional protocol to the Geneva Convention.
The Rome Statute, which created the International Court of Justice, in 1998, made it a war crime to use starvation of civilians as a military tactic in military conflict, with the crime described as an act that deprives people not just of food but also of water, medicine and shelter.
Besides in 2018, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2417, which equally prohibited the use of starvation in conflict, adding that a case in which that conflict threatens to create wide food insecurity should be swiftly brought for consideration by its members.
Tel Aviv policy is deny and deny some more, even in the wake of the food carnage last week, where 115 people were killed and 760 injured when Israeli troops used live fire while hungry and desperate Gazans were gathering around food trucks.