Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Maliki accused Israel on Tuesday of using "starvation as a weapon of war" against approximately one million residents of Gaza. He condemned the international community's failure to respect the rights of Palestinians during a United Nations meeting in Geneva. The United Nations World Food Programme states that half of Gaza's population of 2.3 million is suffering from hunger as the Israeli military assault expands into the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
Speaking in Geneva at the Human Rights Council session marking the 75th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Maliki stated that the meeting "coincides with the suffering of at least one million Palestinians in Gaza, half of whom are children, from hunger due to Israel's deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war against the people it occupies," and not due to a natural disaster or a lack of generous aid expected at the borders.
He added that the Palestinian people are living in a dire reality after being "deprived of their basic rights to life, dignity, and self-determination... amid the silence and acceptance of the international community to Israel's conditions for the entry of food, water, fuel, and medicine." He also mentioned, "The current international system tolerates the selective application of responsibility to respect human rights and international humanitarian law."
Maliki stated that the international community has failed to protect Palestinians, calling for "greater solidarity and global action than ever before to ensure that the Palestinian people obtain their basic rights to life, justice, dignity, and self-determination, and to work on protecting them from the atrocities committed against them."
The Gaza health ministry reported that Israeli attacks have thus far killed at least 18,205 people and injured nearly 50,000 others. It added that several thousand more fatalities could not be counted either because they are under the rubble or due to ambulances' inability to reach them.
