Jerusalem, Dec 18: After France, the UK and Germany joined global calls for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is due in Tel Aviv Monday, and is also expected to press Israel to wind down its offensive in Gaza. The 10-week-old war has killed over 18,700 Palestinians and transformed much of the north of Gaza into a moonscape. Nearly 85 per cent of Gaza’s population have fled their homes.
More than 18,700 Palestinians have been killed since Israel declared war on Hamas, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel says 116 of its soldiers have died in its ground offensive after Hamas raided southern Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and taking about 240 hostages. Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of deliberately starving Gaza’s population, a method of warfare that it described as a war crime.
The New York-based rights organization said Monday that Israeli forces were “deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while wilfully impeding humanitarian assistance (and) apparently razing agricultural areas.”
The United Nations’ food agency reported on December 14 that 56 per cent of Gaza’s households were experiencing “severe levels of hunger,” up from 38 per cent two weeks earlier.
HRW said that following the October 7 attack by Gaza-based militants on Israel that killed around 1,200 people, top Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, made public statements “expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water and fuel.”
Other Israeli officials have made statements conditioning the provision of humanitarian aid on the release of the approximately 240 hostages Palestinian militants took into Gaza, HRW said.
The starving of civilians is a war crime under international humanitarian law. For the first two months of the war, humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza through a single border crossing from Egypt, severely restricting the amount of food and other supplies that could reach the coastal enclave’s residents. After pressure from the United States, Israel reopened a second border-crossing into Gaza last week. But the amount of aid entering the territory is still less than half of prewar imports, even as needs have soared and fighting hinders delivery in many areas. (AP)
