UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, has accused Israel of ‘starving civilians’ including a million children in Gaza by deliberately blocking food and medicine from entering the Strip.
The warning was issued by UNRWA on Sunday, the same day that Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed at least 115 Palestinians across Gaza including 92 who were shot dead desperate to get food supplies.
At the Zikim crossing in the north of the Strip, IOF troops opened fire on large crowds who had gathered in the hope of getting flour from a UN aid convoy.
According to medical sources at least 79 Palestinians were killed.
Nine were shot and killed near an aid point in Rafah in the south where 36 had been killed 24 hours earlier while four were killed near a second ‘aid’ site in Khan Younis according to the Palestinian Civil Defence.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) rejected claims by the IOF that its troops had only fired ‘warning shots’ because they felt ‘threatened’, stating that the victims were simply people ‘trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation.’
The massacre at Zikim happened after a convoy of 25 trucks, organised by the WFP and carrying food for starving Palestinians, had passed through the Zikim crossing.
The WFP said that the shootings came despite assurances from Israel that its armed forces would not be present or engage along convoy routes.
These ‘assurances’ are just more of the litany of lies pumped out by the Zionist regime, and accepted without question by governments in the US and UK, that attempt to cover up the genocidal war crimes being committed daily in Gaza.
Last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted unnamed Israeli soldiers saying that IOF troops were ordered by officers to fire at crowds of Palestinians who posed no threat. The response of military bosses was to deny these accusations saying they did not ‘recognise’ them.
What cannot be dismissed or ‘not recognised’ is the stark fact that the Zionist regime is using starvation as a weapon in its genocidal war to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza from every last Palestinian man, women and child.
In a statement the Gaza Health Ministry said: ‘More than 2.4 million Palestinians, including 1.1 million children, are facing the risk of death due to hunger and the lack of essential supplies.’
While on Sunday, Gaza’s Government Media Office (GMO) stated: ‘The Gaza Strip is on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe amid ongoing mass killings and widespread starvation affecting over 2.4 million people, including 1.1 million children.’
The statement accused the world of ‘watching the systematic slaughter of Gaza – through starvation and extermination – while failing to take action’ and it highlighted that Palestinian territory ‘is facing the largest mass massacres of modern times.’
The imperialist governments led by the US and followed faithfully by the Starmer government in Britain are not just sitting back but are actively engaged in arming and providing all the support that the Zionist regime requires to keep its genocidal war continuing.
At the same time, these governments have turned to the courts and police in an attempt to intimidate and quell the overwhelming mass movement of workers and youth demanding action to end all complicity with genocide.
With millions of Palestinian lives at stake, the time has come for the working class to exert its power by forcing the western trade unions to take action by calling indefinite general strikes to bring down their genocide-enabling capitalist governments, replacing them with workers’ governments and socialism.
Trade union leaders who have sat back and refused to organise any action in support of the Palestinian people must be removed and replaced with a leadership prepared to organise the strength of the working class to smash imperialism with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This requires the building up of the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required for victory. Join today, there is no time to lose!