Middle East Monitor / August 5, 2024
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on Monday that ‘it may be just and moral’ to starve the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza until Israeli hostages are returned, but ‘no one in the world would let us.’ Israel has imposed an almost total siege on Gaza since October 2023, with rights groups including the UN warning that it has limited to entry of food, water and medicines and caused a “man-made famine” which has already killed several dozen children.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced today at a Yad Binyamin conference hosted by Israel Hayom that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip might be “justified and moral,” even if it results in the starvation of two million civilians.
“We are bringing in aid because there is no choice. We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned. Humanitarianism in exchange for humanitarianism is morally justified, but what can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war.” he said.
According to The Times of Israel, the far-right minister further claimed that Israel needs to regain complete control over what enters the Gaza Strip, claiming that Hamas diverting the aid is the “main factor” prolonging the war.
It comes after the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) warned last month that “almost half a million people in Gaza face catastrophic levels of hunger.”
Moreover, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine last month questioned how the world could remain “silent” or “indifferent” on the situation in Gaza, where Israeli attacks since 7 October 2023 have killed more than 39,600 Palestinians, and rendered most of the population homeless and hungry, Anadolu Agency reports.
“How can we remain silent, indifferent, or inactive in the face of this abominable injustice, and not feel hypocritical when commemorating the victims of any other genocide?” Francesca Albanese asked.
According to the latest UN-partnered IPC report on hunger levels, 96 per cent of the population of Gaza – some 2.15 million people – face acute food insecurity at “crisis” level or higher.
Albanese’s remarks were in response to a post by Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, who said “Famine in Gaza has spread from the north to the entire Strip.”
“Every Palestinian in Gaza is now facing famine because of Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign,” he said.
Meanwhile, Smotrich added that while he supports Israel resettling Gaza, he hasn’t demanded that this be defined as one of the war’s goals. He argued that if Israel hadn’t withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, 7 October would never have happened.
