UN reports Gaza receiving lowest level of international aid in months – JURIST

UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said in a UN briefing on Friday: “aThe number of people entering Gaza is at its lowest level in months.” “No one has received food parcels this month due to limited access to aid,” the spokesman continued.

The UN reported that bakeries across the Palestinian-occupied Gaza Strip are closing because bakers cannot get wheat flour, and World Food Program kitchens have been forced to close due to the war. However, Haq said that international organizations are doing their best to maintain humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Specifically, the UN refugee agency (UNRWA) distributes “bread, ready-to-eat or cooked meals and flour in and outside designated emergency shelters.”

Haq’s statement came a month after the release of a UN report on the right to food by Michael Fakhri, which stated that Palestinians are starving due to a campaign by Israel. According to Fakhri, Israel uses “blockades, water shortages, destruction of the food system and general destruction of civilian infrastructure” as methods to enforce hunger. He said this reflected Israel’s “fundamental abdication of its human rights obligations” and that famine was being used as a tool for “genocide, extermination and torture.”

In recent days there have also been reports from UN special rapporteurs that the international order is collapsing in the face of “atrocities” committed in Gaza. According to the report, the International Court of Justice’s interim measures to prevent genocide in Gaza and the court’s ruling that Israel’s occupation of Gaza is unlawful have yet to be implemented. The report called for international aid and action against Israel.