THE UN’s World Food Programme has warned that Palestinians in Gaza are facing starvation after Israel launched a brutal aggression on Gaza last month. Palestinians now face the prospect of being shot to death by Zionist gangsters who want to see a ‘Greater Israel’ established over the dead bodies of the Palestinians.
‘With winter fast approaching, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,’ the executive director of the WFP, Cindy McCain, said in a statement on Thursday.
The WFP said that bread was now ‘scarce or non-existent’ and that the amount of food entering Gaza remains ‘woefully inadequate’. The agency stressed that it was impossible to ‘meet current hunger needs with one operational border crossing,’ calling for the opening of a second safe passage to bring food into Gaza.
‘With only 10 per cent of the necessary food supplies and drink in Gaza since the beginning of this conflict, we’re now facing a massive food gap,’ ie starvation, WFP spokesman, Abeer Etefa, said at a virtual UN news conference.
However, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which supports more than 800,000 displaced people in Gaza, said he believed there was a deliberate attempt to ‘strangle’ its humanitarian work in the Strip.
The truth is that imperialism needs a ‘Greater Israel’, armed to the teeth and ready to kill, to stand guard over the Middle East’s oil wealth, that the imperialists cannot survive without. UNWRA has said many of its services have already been shuttered, including dozens of water wells, two water plants, and sewage pumping stations.
It has now given the judgement that: ‘I do believe there is a deliberate attempt to strangle our operation and paralyse the operation,’ made by UNRWA Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, in Geneva on Thursday shows.
He added: ‘We run the risk to have to suspend the entire humanitarian operation,’ he said, adding, ‘I do believe that it is outrageous that humanitarian agencies have been reduced to begging for fuel.’
Lazzarini said the first delivery of fuel since the start of the Israeli war took place on Wednesday after weeks of pleading for access to fuel. But he noted that that fuel – 24,000 litres of diesel fuel for UN aid distribution trucks – is nowhere near what Gazans need in order to survive.
Lazzarini warned that civilian deaths that are not directly linked to Israel’s strikes were inevitable as a result of the lack of fuel. ‘Today what we are saying is, if the fuel does not come in, people will start to die because of the lack of fuel. Exactly as from when, I don’t know. But it will be sooner rather than later,’ he said.
Referring to the communications blackout due to the lack of fuel, Lazzarini said, ‘It can provoke or accelerate the breakdown of the last remaining civil order we have in the Gaza Strip,’ calling the scale of loss and destruction in Gaza ‘just staggering’. The lack of fuel also endangers hundreds of wounded individuals in the Indonesian Hospital in the north of Gaza.
Israel waged the war on Gaza on October 7, after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas carried out the stunning Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, after catching the Zionists sleeping in their tanks, and punishing them in retaliation for intensifying Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Tel Aviv has now blocked water, food, and electricity to Gaza, plunging the coastal strip into a humanitarian crisis.
According to the Palestinian authorities, at least 11,500 Palestinians, including more than 7,800 women and children, have been killed and over 29,200 others injured in the murderous Israeli strikes from the land and the air.
Israeli forces have raided al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, carrying out building-by-building searches at al-Shifa, where thousands of patients, premature babies, staff, and displaced people are trapped.
Their blundering has exposed the lie that the Command Centre of Hamas was at the hospital. Now the Paltel group has said all telecommunications were down because ‘all energy sources sustaining the network have been depleted, and fuel was not allowed in.’ The UN has warned that the blackout would compound the misery of civilians.
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have already repeatedly targeted hospitals, residential buildings, mosques, and churches. Under the Geneva Convention, attacks on hospitals are strictly prohibited.
The working class of the world must now intervene through its very powerful trade unions.
Workers’ trade unions from the UK to the USA and the EU must organise an international general strike to stop the world to make the Zionist gangsters quit Gaza and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and with all Palestinians enjoying the right to return.
