Gaza: UN humanitarian intervention needed

[Celerity]

Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war and the international community must exercise its ‘responsibility to protect’.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/gaza-un-humanitarian-intervention-needed

Aftermath of an Israeli air strike on Khan Yunis earlier this month (Anas-Mohammed/shutterstock.com)

There is growing global recognition that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. The IPC, the body that assesses food-security crises, believes that famine is imminent for half of its population, some 1.1 million people. The laws of war prohibit the use of starvation in this way. Under the Rome statute establishing the International Criminal Court, parties to a conflict must not prevent citizens gaining access to ‘objects indispensable to their survival’, including by ‘wilfully impeding relief supplies’. A recent Oxfam report has however Link to tweet
" target="_blank">identified a number of ways in which Israel is deliberately obstructing the entry of humanitarian aid. These include an unjustifiably inefficient inspection system; arbitrary rejection of items on grounds of their supposed ‘dual use’ character; wholesale destruction of civilian life in an unprecedentedly brutal military campaign; forced displacement of populations; attacks on aid workers, facilities and convoys, and systematic disruption of humanitarian-relief organisations.

The overland routes are by far the most efficient way to get aid into the strip. Talk instead of maritime passage or air drops risks obfuscating the problem that Israeli control is being used deliberately to starve the people of Gaza. Reflecting the reports of their own staff on the ground, many western officials are recognising the severity of this unfolding crisis. The most senior diplomat in the European Union, Josep Borrell, high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, has accused the state of Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Even the German government, so often stridently pro-Israel since the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, has now echoed Borrell’s analysis.

Rapid-reaction force

Can anything be done to avert this catastrophe? Calls for an immediate ceasefire, as well as the cessation of arm sales, are very welcome and should be acted on urgently. But this, in itself, might not be sufficient to force Israel to facilitate the passage of food aid. Serious consideration should be given to other options to secure the entry of aid, including the use of a rapid-reaction force mandated by the United Nations. Military action should not be taken lightly. It should always be a last resort. In this case, the political barriers are clearly enormous.

But the world has a shared ‘responsibility to protect’ when ‘national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’. This threshold has evidently been met in Gaza. A UN Security Council resolution would make a peacekeeping operation lawful. The mandate could be narrowly defined—a limited UN military operation to open and protect humanitarian aid routes into all of Gaza, independent of Israel Defence Forces control and inspection. In all likelihood, practical steps in this direction could be sufficient in themselves to force a change in policy by Israel. But international parties would have to be prepared to follow through if necessary.

Humanitarian intervention...........

snip

[Basic LA]

1. Who purposely starves children to death?

It can't be self defense. Is it vengeful rage against the parents? Is this the organized annihilation of an entire ethnicity, a blood feud with indigenous people who were shoved off their land then labeled as terrorists for their resistance?
Are these poor Gazan children proxies for previous historic antagonists?
How can an advanced nation (with total American backing) systematically starve children to death in the 21st Century? And starve them before the world's puzzled, horrified eyes?
No one will ever see Israel the same. No kind, funny, intelligent Jewish person I ever knew, including my dear late wife, fits this profile. Help us understand the well-planned starvation of innocent kids, already orphaned & maimed.
Israel, please rethink this. Your friends are aghast, your defenders are fading.
As for Uncle Sam's complicity, the old true-blue alliance & sympathies are in question.

[Lonestarblue]

2. Israel is purposely starving Palestinians, including children, and incidentally their own hostages.

Starving people will not give food to the Israeli enemy. Israel also commits war crimes by bombing hospitals, again killing their own hostages. Netanyahu is just as much a war criminal as Putin.

[Basic LA]

3. Yes indeed.

You summed up the situation perfectly.

[2naSalit]

4. Apparently...

isrealis do.