UN investigator accuses Israel of a 'starvation campaign' in Gaza that Netanyahu denies
right to food accused Israel of carrying out a "starvation campaign" against Palestinians during the war in Gaza, an allegation that Israel vehemently denies.
In a report this week, investigator Michael Fakhri claimed it began two days after Hamas' surprise attack in southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people, when Israel's military offensive in response blocked all food, water, fuel and other supplies into Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said accusations of Israel limiting humanitarian aid were «outrageously false».
«A deliberate starvation policy? You can say anything — it doesn't make it true,» he said in a press conference Wednesday.
Following intense international pressure — especially from close ally the United States — Netanyahu's government gradually has opened several border crossings for tightly controlled deliveries. Fakhri said limited aid initially went mostly to southern and central Gaza, not to the north where Israel had ordered Palestinians to go.
A professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Fakhri was appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council as the investigator, or special rapporteur, on the right to food and assumed the role in 2020.
«By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 per cent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger,» Fakhri said. «Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.»
Fakhri, who teaches
