Human Rights Watch: Israeli government is starving Palestinians

The government of Israel is not complying with the order of the UN’s highest court to provide urgently needed aid to the desperate residents of the Gaza Strip, according to the human rights monitoring organization “Human Rights Watch”, as quoted by the newspaper “The Guardian”.

In a ruling last month, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to comply with six interim measures, including “taking immediate and effective measures to provide urgently needed basic services and humanitarian aid to improve the adverse living conditions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Human Rights Watch said Israel was not complying with the court’s aid order and said that in the weeks following the court’s ruling, an average of 30 percent of Israelis were entering the Gaza Strip every day. the number of aid trucks entering has decreased.

She said Israel had not sufficiently facilitated fuel deliveries to the hard-hit northern Gaza Strip and accused Israel of blocking aid flows to the north, where the World Food Program said last week it had been forced to halt aid deliveries due to growing chaos in the isolated enclave.

“The Israeli government is starving 2.3 million people. Gaza’s Palestinians, putting them at even greater risk than before the World Court’s binding order,” said Omar Shakir, Israel-Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.

“The Israeli government has simply ignored the court ruling and in some respects has even stepped up its repression, including further blocking vital aid,” he said.

Israel denies that it is restricting the flow of aid and blames humanitarian organizations operating in the Gaza Strip, saying that hundreds of aid trucks are parked idle on the Palestinian side of the main border crossing. The UN says it cannot always get trucks to the crossing because it is sometimes too dangerous.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s office also said Monday that the war cabinet had approved a plan to safely deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip in a way that “prevents looting.”