Bowen: Denying food to Gaza is 'weapon of war', says UN refugee agency head

How do you measure misery? For journalists the usual way is to see it, to feel it, to smell it.

Beleaguered Palestinian colleagues in Gaza are doing that, still doing invaluable reporting at great risk to themselves. More than 200 have been killed doing their jobs.

Israel does not allow international journalists into Gaza.

Denied the chance of eyewitness reporting – one of the best tools of the job – we can study, from a distance, the assessments of aid organisations operating in Gaza.

Pascal Hundt, deputy director of operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross said last week that civilians in Gaza faced "an overwhelming daily struggle to survive the dangers of hostilities, cope with relentless displacement, and endure the consequences of being deprived of urgent humanitarian assistance."

He added: "This situation must not—and cannot—be allowed to escalate further."

But it might, if Israel continues the plunge deeper into war that resumed on 18 March when it broke a two-month ceasefire with a massive series of air strikes.

Israel had already sealed the gates of Gaza. Since the beginning of March, it has blocked all shipments of humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies.

The return to war ended any chance of moving on to the ceasefire's proposed second phase, which Israel and Hamas had agreed would end with the release of all the remaining hostages in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

That was unacceptable to the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the ultra-nationalist religious extremists who keep him in power.

They want Gaza's Palestinians to be replaced by Jewish settlers. They threatened to topple Netanyahu's government if he did not go back to war, and the end of Netanyahu's political career would bring the day of reckoning for his part in Israel's failure to prevent the deadly Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. It might also force a conclusion in his long trial on corruption charges.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is now promising a new "intense" offensive into Gaza in the days after President Donald Trump finishes his swing through the wealthy Arab oil monarchies in the Gulf later this week.

The offensive includes a plan to displace massive numbers of Palestinian civilians on top of waves of artillery, air strikes and death. "To displace" is a cold verb. It means families having only handfuls of minutes to flee for their lives, from an area that might be hit immediately to one that might be hit later. Hundreds of thousands have done so repeatedly since the war began.

Gaza was one of the most overcrowded places on earth before the war. Israel's plan is to force as many Gazans as possible into a tiny area in the south, near the ruins of the town of Rafah, which has been almost entirely destroyed.

Before that happens, the UN humanitarian office estimates that 70% of Gaza is already effectively off limits to Palestinians. Israel's plan is to leave them in an even smaller area. The UN and leading aid groups reject Israeli claims that Hamas steals and controls food that comes into Gaza. They have refused to cooperate with a scheme dreamt up by Israel and the US that would use private security firms, protected by Israeli troops, to distribute basic rations.

Far from Gaza, in London, I talked to Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of Unrwa, the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees. He told me that he was running out of words "to describe the misery and the tragedy affecting the people in Gaza. They have been now more than two months without any aid".

"Starvation is spreading, people are exhausted, people are hungry... we can expect that in the coming weeks if no aid is coming in, that people will not die because of the bombardment, but they will die because of the lack of food. This is the weaponisation of humanitarian aid."

If words are not enough, look at the most authoritative data-driven assessment of famine and food emergencies in the regular reports issued by Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. It is a joint venture by UN agencies, aid groups and governments that measures whether a famine is happening.

The latest IPC update says Gaza is close to famine. But it says that the entire population, more than two million people, almost half of whom are children, is experiencing acute food insecurity. In plain English, that means they are being starved by Israel's blockade.

The IPC says that 470,000 Gazans, 22% of the population, are in a classification it calls "Phase 5 – catastrophe." The IPC defines it as a condition in which "at least one in five households experience an extreme lack of food and face starvation resulting in destitution, extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition and death."

In practical terms, the phase five classification, the most acute used by the IPC, estimates that "71,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers will need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition."

Thousands of tons of the food, medical aid and humanitarian supplies that they need are sitting only a few miles away, on the other side of the border in Egypt.

In London I asked Mr Lazzarini whether he agreed with those who have accused Israel of denying food and humanitarian aid to civilians as a weapon of war.

"I have absolutely no doubt," he said, "that this is what we have witnessed during this last 19 months, especially during this last two months. That's a war crime. The quantification will come from the ICJ [International Court of Justice] not from me, but what I can say, what we see, what we observe, food and humanitarian assistance is indeed being used to meet the political or military objective in the context of Gaza."

I asked Mr Lazzarini whether the blockade, on top of a year and half of war and destruction, might amount to genocide. That is the accusation against Israel levelled by South Africa and other states at the ICJ in The Hague.

"Listen, by any account, the destruction is massive. The number of people who have been killed is huge and certainly underestimated. We have seen the systematic destruction also of a school, of a health centre. People have been constant pinballs within Gaza, moving all the time. So there is absolutely no doubt that we are talking about massive atrocities. Genocide? It could end up to genocide. There are many elements which could go in this direction."

Israel's defence minister Israel Katz has made no secret of Israel's tactics. Last month Katz said that the blockade was a "main pressure lever" to secure victory over Hamas and to get the all the hostages out. The National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir agreed. He wrote that: "The cessation of humanitarian aid is one of the main levers of pressure on Hamas. The return of aid to Gaza before Hamas gets on its knees and releases all of our hostages would be a historic mistake."

Netanyahu's plans for another offensive, and the remarks made by Katz, Ben-Gvir and others, horrified Israeli families with hostages still inside Gaza. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum which represents many of them, said minister Katz was pushing an "illusion... Israel is choosing to seize territory before the hostages."

Dissident Israeli military reservists also protested, saying that they were being forced to fight again not for Israeli security but for the political survival of the Israeli government. In the air force reserve, 1,200 pilots signed an open letter saying that prolonging the war served mainly "political and personal interests and not security ones". Netanyahu blamed a small group of "bad apples" for the open letter.

For many months Netanyahu and his government have also accused Mr Lazzarini of lying. One official report posted online in January of this year was headed "Dismantling Unrwa Chief Lazzarini's Falsehoods". It claimed that he had "consistently made false statements which have profoundly misinformed the public debate on this issue." Unrwa, Israel says, has been infiltrated and exploited by Hamas to an unprecedented degree. It says some Unrwa employees took part in the attacks of 7 October.

Mr Lazzarini denies the personal accusations directed at him by Israel and the broader ones aimed at Unrwa. He says Unrwa investigated 19 staff named by Israel and concluded nine of them may have a case to answer. All 19 were suspended. Mr Lazzarini said that since then Unrwa had received "hundreds of allegations from the State of Israel. Each time, as a rule-based organisation, we keep asking for substantiated information." He said they had never received it.

All wars are political, and none more than the ones between Israel and the Palestinians. The war engages and enrages the outside world as well the belligerents.

Israel argues that self-defence justifies its actions since 7 October 2023 when Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others attacked Israel, killed around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and took 251 others hostage. Any other government, it says, would have done the same.

Palestinians and an increasingly concerned and outraged chorus of states, including some of Israel's key European allies, say that does not justify the continuation of the most devastating assault on Palestinians since the war of 1948, when Israel gained its independence, which Palestinians call "the catastrophe".

Even President Trump shows signs of distancing himself from Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that the people of Gaza must be fed.

The allegation that the total denial of food to Gazan civilians is more evidence of an Israeli genocide against Palestinians has outraged Benjamin Netanyahu, his government and many Israeli citizens. It produced rare political unity in Israel. The leader of the opposition Yair Lapid, normally a stern critic of Netanyahu, condemned "a moral collapse and a moral disaster" at the ICJ.

Genocide is defined as the destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The International Criminal Court, a separate body, has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister on war crimes charges, which they reject. The three Hamas leaders who were also the subject of ICC warrants have all been killed by Israel.

It is not too soon to think about the longer-term impact of this devastating war, even though its end is not in sight. Mr Lazzarini told me that "in the coming years we will realise how wrong we have been… on the wrong side of the history. We have under our watch let a massive atrocity unfold."

It started, he said, with the Hamas attacks on Israel on the 7 October: "The largest killing of Israeli and Jewish in the region since World War II" had been followed by a "massive" military response by Israel.

It was, he said, "disproportionate, basically almost leading to the annihilation of an entire population in their homeland... I think there is a collective responsibility from the international community, the level, the passivity, the indifference being shown until now, the lack of political, diplomatic, economic action. I mean, it's absolutely monstrous, especially in our countries where we have said 'never again'."

Ahead may be an attempt to realise Donald Trump's dangerous fantasy of Gaza as the Dubai of the Mediterranean, rebuilt and owned by America and without Palestinians. It has given shape to cherished dreams of Israeli extremists who threaten of the removal of Palestinians from the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Whatever lies ahead, it will not be peace.