Democracy Now! / September 17, 2024
Guests :
Michael Fakhri – United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food and law professor at the University of Oregon, where he leads the Food Resiliency Project
Francesca Albanese – United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory and affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University
Links :
“Starvation and the right to food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty”
Top United Nations human rights experts have condemned Western nations for supporting Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, urging the world to stop an unfolding genocide in Palestine. This comes as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, is accusing Israel in a new report of carrying out a deliberate starvation campaign in Gaza. “What we are witnessing in Gaza is the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians. We’ve never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely,” says Fakhri, who joins us from Brazil. We also speak with Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, who says Israel’s assault on Gaza is part of a larger plan of “getting as much control as possible over maximum land with minimum Palestinian people.”
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: Top experts at the United Nations have strongly condemned Western countries for supporting Israel’s devastating war on Gaza. Speakers at a U.N. press conference Monday included Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation.
PEDRO ARROJO-AGUDO: The lack of clean water has led to 1.7 million cases of infection diseases, mainly diarrhea, dysentery and hepatitis A, particularly affecting children, as well as cases of polio, smallpox and other infectious diseases that can trigger massive and deadly epidemics. All this coupled with the lack of medical care result in deaths, especially of babies and children, making water scarcity and contamination a silent bomb which has far less visibility than those that destroy buildings, but a no less lethal bomb.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, has accused Israel, in a new report, of carrying out a starvation campaign in Gaza. Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, wrote in response to the report, quote, “The way Israel is destroying Palestinian food sovereignty will be studied not only as a shocking example of genocidal conduct, but also as a textbook case of sadistic disrespect for human life & dignity,” unquote.
U.N. special rapporteurs Francesca Albanese is joining us now from Tunisia, and Michael Fakhri is joining us from Brasília in Brazil.
We thank you both for being with us. Michael Fakhri, let’s begin with you. You have just released this report. Can you explain what you found?
MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes, Amy. What we’re witnessing in Gaza is the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians. We’ve never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely. So, in this report, I answer the question, “How was this possible? How was Israel able to starve so many Palestinians so quickly and so completely?”
And the story starts, of course, with the political economy of Gaza. This story starts, in some ways, in 1991. Israel started restricting the flow of goods into Gaza starting in 1991. By 2000, it imposes a full blockade. So, what we saw from 2000 to 2002 is the rate of malnutrition amongst children in Gaza doubled. In 2005, what Israel did is it changed the nature of its occupation: It pulled its military out of Gaza and surrounded Gaza in a siege.
So, since 2000 until now, Israel has created a wall, in effect, a wall around Gaza, limiting the flow of goods. And what they did is they counted calories. They made sure that people in Gaza were just hungry enough to be weak but not so hungry to raise an alarm. So, right before October 7th of last year, 50% of Palestinians in Gaza were food insecure, and 80% depended on humanitarian aid.
So, when this war started, Israel announced its starvation campaign on October 9, and that’s, in effect, what they did. And they’ve been pushing people from the north into the south, while at the same time continuing to bomb civilian structures and target schools, hospitals and homes.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain — this is the first report that includes graphic reporting, Michael Fakhri.
MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes. The situation is so horrific in Gaza right now that I felt that words weren’t enough to explain what’s going on. But words weren’t enough also to imagine a better future for Palestinians, but for people all over the world. This report focuses on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty, but it looks at how starvation is being used as an — increasing rate by forces all over the world.
And so, I was lucky to work with Omar Khouri, an artist from Lebanon. And what we presented are illustrations and graphic reports highlighting the struggle of fishers, highlighting what food sovereignty means for the Palestinian people, but for everyone, and highlighting what it means to maintain and fight for your dignity despite the genocidal violence that the Palestinians are experiencing.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Fakhri, who did you talk to for this report?
MICHAEL FAKHRI: For this report, I’ve consulted starvation and right-to-food experts from all over the world. I received direct testimony from people in Gaza. I spoke to U.N. workers both within Palestinian territories and around the world. I spoke to diplomats from countries from all over the world. And I did my own research, and I drew from statistics from the U.N. And this was standard, standard methodology for any U.N. human rights report.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has suggested starving the entire Gaza Strip to death could be justified. He told a conference last month, quote, “Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.” Smotrich also repeated the Israeli government’s goal of removing the threat of Palestinian statehood. You have that, and then you also have what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, that accusations of Israel limiting humanitarian aid were outrageously false. He said, “A deliberate starvation policy? You can say anything — it doesn’t make it true.” Your response, U.N. rapporteur Michael Fakhri?
MICHAEL FAKHRI: There is never an exception to starving civilians. There is never a justification for starving any civilian, whether it’s one person or 2.3 million. And this is in the context of genocide. And there is no exception to genocide. Israeli officials, since October 9th until today, have explicitly announced their intent to starve civilians. And they’ve executed their plan, and we’ve seen the effects of their plan.
We also have received reports regularly and consistently from U.N. sources that humanitarian aid is either blocked or restricted. And then, even when it goes through, these humanitarian convoys, that are coordinating with Israeli forces, are targeted by Israeli forces. And then, even when these humanitarian aid convoys reach civilians, civilians have been repeatedly targeted, shot and killed while trying to get aid.
But the issue is not just aid and the denial of goods. The issue is Israel has been weakening and destroying the food system in Gaza in this war and previously. Over 75% of the agricultural system has been destroyed. Fishers have been targeted. Orchards have been uprooted. Shepherds have been targeted and shot at. So, what Israel is trying to do is making — is they’re trying to make sure that the Palestinian people can’t feed themselves. This starvation campaign is part of displacing Palestinians from their land, and it’s part of a plan to annex not just Gaza but the West Bank, as well. The last two years, we’ve seen record violence against Palestinians, especially Palestinian farmers. This is, again, targeting all Palestinians in all of their territory, so it’s not just about Gaza. It’s Israel has over the decades attacked and destroyed the Palestinian food system as a way to create the conditions of starvation, and in this case now to the degree of genocidal violence.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Fakhri, according to your report, 34 Palestinians, the majority of them children, are known to have starved to death since October 7th?
MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes. And this is what indicates to us that it’s a full-blown famine across all of Gaza. So, you can imagine a situation, when a community is struggling, the first thing they always do is they feed their children. This is true throughout history. And so, when a parent is watching their child waste away before their very eyes and is unable to do anything and that child dies, when the first child dies in a community, that indicates to us that that whole society is being attacked. And when the first Palestinian child died, that confirmed that the situation in Gaza is a situation of famine.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you’re expecting to give — present this report to the U.N. General Assembly in October. What are you expecting? How will this be presented?
MICHAEL FAKHRI: Right now all of us, all the U.N. human rights experts, and, I think, the whole world is watching closely the current draft resolution that’s before the General Assembly, that is — in the draft, they’re calling for sanctions against Israel. Since the first weeks of this war, we, as independent human rights experts, have been calling for a ceasefire, an immediate ceasefire, and sanctions against Israel. And we’ll see how this resolution goes through.
By the time I get to New York on October 18th, if there are no sanctions, I will repeat that call for sanctions against Israel. And what I will — I will tell the General Assembly what is at stake. What is at stake is the global order itself. How the world responds to Gaza and to the Palestinian struggle for liberation will determine the structure and the fate of the U.N. and the global order, because what’s at stake is, of course, the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, their right to return to the territory in Palestine, and American global power and Europe is facing an existential crisis. This is what’s at stake. This is why millions of people are marching in the streets in solidarity with the Palestinians. If the world does not respond to Palestine today just like the world is not responding to the starvation in Sudan, we are going to see more and more starvation campaigns around the world into the future.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to bring in Francesca Albanese into this conversation, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. You’re in La Marsa, Tunisia, where you participated from in that news conference yesterday in Geneva. You talked about the significance of this report. Can you respond?
FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes. I was really impressed by the report that my colleague Michael Fakhri produced, because not only it analyzed what he just said — I cannot really add to the brilliant presentation he gave — but it put things in context, which is something that tends to be missed when discussing the situation of Palestinians under Israeli military rule. People tend to align themselves or accept uncritically the narrative of the two parties in conflict, without capturing the troubling asymmetry that exists between the Palestinians, the occupied people, and Israel, the protracted occupier, which is colonizing, annexing by force the little territory that remain. So, the fact of bringing the attention back to the root causes and the fact that this didn’t start on October 7, didn’t start even with the blockade that has been declared on Gaza 17 years ago, this is a long-term plan that Israel has somewhat devised to achieve its final goal, which is getting as much control as possible over maximum land with minimum Palestinian people.
AMY GOODMAN: Francesca Albanese, you’ve said the attack that Israel has unleashed is not just against Palestinians in Gaza, it’s against Palestinians as a whole. Explain.
FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Absolutely. Amy, since the beginning of the assault against Gaza on the beginning of October, following, of course, the attack unleashed by Hamas and the other Palestinian armed groups, we have recorded an escalation of violence against the Palestinians in the rest of the occupied territory, both East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Over 11 months, 670 Palestinians have been killed. Curfew, incursions and raids have escalated at unprecedented rates, particularly against the northern Gaza, that over the past two weeks has experienced less lethal but similar attacks on civilian infrastructure — roads, water reservoir, electricity, electricity sources and homes — that are unjustifiable.
And the other thing is the detention. Arbitrary detention, detention without any legal justification of Palestinians, both from the Gaza Strip but all the more the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have skyrocketed. And all Palestinians, no matter their place of residence, have been exposed to humiliation and sadism in what B’Tselem has qualified as a network of torture across Israeli detention centers. How can we explain that? That is why I say when the international community has failed to prevent genocide in Gaza, we have to be very careful, because I do see patterns of violence clearly expanding to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And ultimately, the goal is the same: expel the Palestinians, forcibly displace the Palestinians from the little that remain of their land. And this is not something that I’m inferring from the evidence; this is something that is accompanied by endless statements of Israeli political leaders and actions of both army and settlers, illegal settlers, that have been armed by Israeli ministers. So, this is a state — there is a state endeavor sustaining this wide attack against the Palestinian people as such.
AMY GOODMAN: Francesca Albanese, we want to thank you for being with us, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, speaking to us from La Marsa, Tunisia, and Michael Fakhri, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food. We will link to your report — well, you’re going to present it at the United Nations next month — the report titled “Starvation and the Right to Food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty.” Michael Fakhri is a professor of law at the University of Oregon, where he leads the Food Resiliency Project, speaking to us from Brasília, Brazil.
