{"id":258867,"date":"2024-04-08T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-04-08T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=258867"},"modified":"2024-04-07T19:45:17","modified_gmt":"2024-04-07T18:45:17","slug":"israel-is-wielding-starvation-as-a-weapon-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/israel-is-wielding-starvation-as-a-weapon-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel Is Wielding Starvation as a Weapon of War"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Democracy NOW! photo<\/p><\/div>\n

4 Apr 2024<\/em> – Israel is wielding starvation as a weapon of war, imposing a famine on the more than two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, one million of whom are children. Twenty-seven children have already starved to death since Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, on October 9th, \u201cThere will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed\u2026We are fighting human animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

On April 1st, Israel attacked a World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy with three separate missile strikes while on a so-called \u201cdeconflicted\u201d route in Gaza, killing seven of the aid group\u2019s workers as they coordinated the delivery of hundreds of tons of food.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, in the last day there was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip,\u201d Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video message. \u201cIt happens in war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The world-renowned chef Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s, founder of World Central Kitchen, who has worked in many conflict zones, told a different story. He said the convoy had coordinated their route with the Israeli military. He told Reuters, \u201cThey were target[ed] systematically, car by car\u2026we were targeted deliberately, nonstop, until everybody was dead in this convoy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a timeline of the attack, describing at least three missile strikes. After the first strike, Haaretz reported, \u201csome of the passengers were seen leaving the car after it was hit and switching to one of the other two\u2026seconds later, another missile hit their car.\u201d Then, \u201cthe third car in the convoy approached, and the passengers began to transfer to it the wounded who had survived the second strike in order to get them out of danger. But then a third missile struck them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The World Central Kitchen workers killed were Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, 25, of Palestine, Zomi Frankcom, 43, of Australia, Damian Sob\u00f3l, 35, of Poland, Jacob Flickinger, 33, a dual US\/Canadian citizen and three British military veterans providing security: John Chapman, 57, James Henderson, 33 and James Kirby, 47.<\/p>\n

Of course, these are not the only aid workers killed so far in Gaza. Jamie McGoldrick, the UN\u2019s Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, stated, \u201cAs of 20 March, at least 196 humanitarians had been killed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since October 2023. This is nearly three times the death toll recorded in any single conflict in a year\u2026There is no safe place left in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n

The vast majority of those killed were Palestinians who worked for UNRWA<\/span>, the UN\u2019s principal relief agency in Gaza. +972 Magazine reported this week that the Israeli army has been using AI-driven targeting systems, one called \u201cLavender\u201d and another called \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy?\u201d that \u201csystematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes \u2014 usually at night while their whole families were present.\u201d Thus, entire families are wiped out.<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s criticized sending \u201cweapons provided by America, not to defend Israel itself from missile attacks, but just weapons that are killing civilians,\u201d Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s told Reuters. \u201cI think the best and only way forward to have hope of a peace deal that can at least allow the parties to start talking. I will not say we will just keep bombing every single person that moves inside Gaza, killing every single child. And if you are not killing them by bombs, you are starving them by lack of food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neve Gordon, a third-generation Israeli, is an international law professor at Queen Mary University of London and the vice president of the British Society for Middle East Studies. In a recent New York Review of Books article titled, \u201cThe Road to Famine in Gaza,\u201d he wrote,<\/p>\n

\u201cLike most famines, it is also the product of a longer history. Since 1967, when Israel first occupied the Gaza Strip, it has controlled the Palestinian food basket, engineering the nutritional intake of its inhabitants and using food as a weapon to manage the population. For decades Israel has systematically damaged the Strip\u2019s capacity to produce its own foodstuffs, decreasing its access to drinkable water and nutritional food. Understanding these longer-term policies is crucial for making sense of the famine unfolding in Gaza now.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

World Central Kitchen has suspended its work in Gaza, where the Israeli-imposed famine is worsening. Chef Andr\u00e9s grew emotional in his interview with Reuters. \u201cThis looks like it\u2019s not a war against terrorism anymore. It seems it\u2019s a war against humanity itself. You cannot be destroying every building. You cannot be destroying every hospital, every school. You cannot be targeting humanitarians. You cannot be targeting children. You cannot be fighting the basis of what humanity should be standing for.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Apr 2024 – Israel is imposing a famine on the more than two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, one million of whom are children. Twenty-seven children have already starved to death since Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: \u201cThere will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed\u2026 We are fighting human animals.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":258848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224],"tags":[532,1854,2898,1199,2242,87,865,1643,1029,1966,1644,88,2416,715,427,124,70,965,1025],"class_list":["post-258867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-rights","tag-colonialism","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-ecocide","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-famine","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-genocide-convention","tag-hamas","tag-hunger","tag-international-court-of-justice-icj","tag-israel","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-massacre","tag-palestine","tag-united-nations","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258867"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258924,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258867\/revisions\/258924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}