Palestinian and Israeli envoys traded angry accusations Wednesday at the United Nations over the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, as aid and human rights groups warned of “mass starvation” in the war-torn territory.
Israel is facing growing international pressure over chronic food shortages in Gaza, where more than two million people lack food and other essentials after 21 months of conflict.
Even after Israel began easing a more than two-month aid blockade in late May, Gaza’s population is still suffering extreme scarcities.
“Every day now we receive heart-wrenching messages from Gaza…’I am hungry,'” Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour told the Security Council.
“This is what our children are saying and every individual in Gaza is saying: ‘I am hungry. There is no food for my family. We are dying. Help us,'” he said.
“What should we tell them? What should the Security Council tell them? That the whole world is against this starvation policy and yet it is worsening?”
But Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon accused the Islamist movement Hamas, which rules Gaza, of using the misery to “feed it into their propaganda machine.”
“For Hamas, the suffering of its own people is their greatest weapon,” he said.
Claiming Israel was making the Middle East safer, Danon accused the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of “bias” against his country.
OCHA is a “propaganda machine” against Israel, he said, which purposely undercounts aid trucks heading into Gaza.
“We will not work with organizations that have chosen politics over principles,” Danon said, with Israel in future granting just one-month visas to the agency’s international staff.
More than 100 aid and human rights groups said Wednesday that “mass starvation” was spreading in the Gaza Strip, and France warned of a growing “risk of famine” caused by “the blockade imposed by Israel.”
“I don’t know what you would call it other than mass starvation — and it’s man-made,” World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
The lack of food and water was affecting the ability of journalists to carry out their work documenting the conflict.
AFP’s journalists in Gaza said this week that desperate hunger and lack of clean water is making them ill and exhausted.
Some have even had to cut back on their coverage of the war, now in its 22nd month, with one journalist saying “we have no energy left due to hunger.”
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© Agence France-Presse
