This is the first time that Washington has warned its ally so clearly since the letter sent by the US Secretaries of State and Defense Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin to the Israeli government calling on it to improve humanitarian access to the Palestinian enclave under threat of suspension of some of the military aid it receives.
Yesterday, during a new meeting of the UN Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield raised the tone: “We have clearly informed the Israeli government, at the highest level, that it will have to do more to settle the unacceptable and devastating humanitarian crisis”.
“The government of Israel has stated that it is not its policy that food and other vital supplies will not be cut off (from the Gaza Strip), and we will be watching to see if Israel’s actions on the ground correspond with that. statement,” added Thomas-Greenfield.
“The US will continue to make this clear: food and supplies must flow to Gaza immediately. And there must be humanitarian pauses throughout Gaza to allow vaccination, access and distribution of aid,” the American diplomat emphasized.
“A ‘starvation policy’ in northern Gaza would be horrific and unacceptable and would have repercussions under international law and US law,” Thomas-Greenfield threatened.
At the same meeting, the UN’s deputy head of humanitarian aid, Joyce Msuya, called it “unacceptable that there is almost no humanitarian access”, citing “unbearable suffering in northern Gaza”.
From Berlin the head of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini warned, speaking to reporters also yesterday that “famine and extreme malnutrition are unfortunately possible again” in the Gaza Strip.
He said he had seen a “dramatic reduction” in the number of convoys carrying food aid to the southern part of the enclave, which had reached “an average of 50 to 60 for two million people”.
He also added that in the northern part of Gaza almost 400,000 people are trapped by the fighting and the access of humanitarian aid there “has become extremely complicated”.
In fact, Lazzarini assessed that “the hunger in the Gaza Strip is artificially created”, accusing Israel of “actively preventing convoys from crossing the border”.
“Some members of the Israeli government are using famine as a weapon of war,” he said.
Before entering the Security Council meeting, Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon rejected the accusations, asserting that “more than one million tons of aid” had entered Gaza.
“The problem is Hamas, which embezzles aid (…) and sells it to feed the terror machine, while the civilian population suffers,” he assessed, accusing the Palestinian organization of “using the humanitarian situation as a weapon” ».
Furthermore, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, told the German newspaper Bild that his country is doing “everything to allow the international community to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
He also assured that his country “has done and is doing more than any other for its enemies”.
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