Israel Strikes Another Food Distribution Center in Part of Starvation Campaign, Dozens of Casualties

The U.S.-backed IDF militants continue to kill Palestinians in Gaza with impunity

The purported aftermath of Israel’s latest attack on Rafah. (X)

U.S.-backed IDF militants struck another United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) food distribution center in Rafah on Wednesday, killing at least one staff member and injuring 22 others.

“Today’s attack on one of the very few remaining UNRWA distribution centres in the Gaza Strip comes as food supplies are running out, hunger is widespread and, in some areas, turning into famine,” said UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

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UN experts said Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Last month, Israeli troops fired on crowds of Palestinians gathered to collect flour in the south-west of Gaza City, killing at least 112 people and injuring some 760.

Josep Borrell, the top EU diplomat, said, “Starvation is being used as a war arm and when we condemned this happening in Ukraine, we have to use the same words for what is happening in Gaza.”

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The Biden administration’s collective cowardice has resulted in the deaths of an untold number of Gazan children.

Michael Fakhri, the special UN rapporteur on the right to food who authored the UN report, told Mondoweiss:

“We’ve never seen children pushed into malnutrition so quickly. This was all preventable.”

“I have no doubt — and this is again in consultation with experts all over the world — we all have no doubt that the horror, the numbers, the degree of hunger, the degree of death from malnutrition will be higher than we’re able to measure right now.”

Daniella Weiss, a top Israeli settler who served as mayor of a West Bank “settlement” (land stealer in violation of the Geneva Conventions and article 242 of the United Nations) called Kedumim, said one way to eradicate Palestinians from Gaza is to starve them out. 

“They will move,” she said in an interview on TikTok. “The Arabs will move… So, we don’t give them food, we don’t give the Arabs anything, and they will have to leave. The world will accept them.”

Human Rights Watch said in December that the Israeli government is using starvation as a method of warfare, which is a war crime.

Top government officials have publicly supported the plan and called on the country to prevent shipments of medication, food, and fuel into the enclave. Reports have emerged from Gaza that young children are undergoing amputations without anesthesia. Gazans in the northern part of the city are eating grass to stay alive. 

Earlier in the war, Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, spoke about how rampant disease could benefit the military campaign.

WSWS quoted his article:

Who are the “poor” women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers… 

The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.

Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli-‘settler’ who has called for entire Palestinian towns to be wiped out—even before the Hamas attack and envisions a Palestinian-free Gaza when the war is over, said last month he ordered the 1,049 containers from reaching UNRWA in Gaza. He justified his order by citing Israeli intelligence that claimed Hamas fighters held positions in the UN-run agency. 

TRENDPOST: By its cutting off food and essential supplies, Israel has not hidden the fact that it is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. And even in pre October war days before they began to destroy Gaza in the name of destroying Hamas, Israel had limited the amount of humanitarian aid into the enclave. The UN has said Gaza normally received about 500 trucks a day, but that number—which was inadequate—has been reduced to a trickle.