Volker Türk tells Jeremy Bowen there is a "plausible" case that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war.

After months of warnings, a recent UN-backed report offered hard statistical evidence that the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is turning into a man-made famine.

It has increased the pressure on Israel to fulfil its legal responsibilities to protect Palestinian civilians, and to allow adequate supplies of humanitarian aid to reach the people who need it.

The UN’s most senior human rights official, Volker Türk, said in a BBC interview that Israel bore significant blame, and that there was a “plausible” case that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

Mr Türk, who is the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that if intent was proven, that would amount to a war crime.

Israel’s economy minister, Nir Barkat, a senior politician in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, dismissed Mr Türk’s warnings as “total nonsense - a totally irresponsible thing to say”.

    • Lovstuhagen@hilariouschaos.comOPMEnglish
      01·
      8 months ago

      I appreciate that you are here as an Israeli and what unique insights you may have on this, and that I want you to know that… I love Goa Trance from Israel. One of my good friends is a Swedish Jew who became a naturalized Israeli just last year. As an American, of course, I also grew up with some good Jewish friends.

      And half my family is Iranian. So, this adds something to the mix for me…

      I have a very American sense of “rights” and how government should function, a very Western appreciation for Israeli culture and people, and yet I have a foot in the camp of an Iranian perspective on Middle Eastern geopolitics and the feelings many Middle Eastern Muslims and Christians have…

      So, I would just say… My vision for what should have happeend is that

      • Jews would be free to settle in Palestine in significant numbers after WWII
      • They would live in a single state with non-Jewish Palestinians
      • Political power would, of course, be shared
      • Everyone would enjoy identical rights, no privileges
      • Palestine could make its flag with the cross, the crescent, the star of david, and spent the last decades as a symbol of ability of the Abrahamic faiths to live together (along with the many secular people who live there)

      And, based on my vision of what it could be, that is how I would want it to be.

      And I would want it to all come to reality without violence or displacement, and for foreign aid to Palestine/Israel to take on the form of paying very handsome amounts of money to bring Palestinians up to higher standards of living and also creating the basis for peace.