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Gaza: Report of Severe Violations of Food, Water & Housing Rights- Press Conference | United Nations

  • October 20, 2024



Gaza: Report of Severe Violations of Food, Water & Housing Rights- Press Conference | United Nations

After presenting their annual reports to the General Assembly, the Special Rapporteurs on the rights to food, water, and housing – Michael Fakhri, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, respectively, today (18 Oct) discussed how these rights are being violated in Gaza.

Fakhri said his report “answers a very specific question; how was Israel able to starve 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza so quickly and so completely?” and noted that “we have never seen in modern history this speed of starvation ever.”

He explained that “this doesn’t start on October 7th,” and pointed out that “from 2000 to 2023, Israel has a profound degree of control over Gaza.”

Fakhri said, “it’s like a faucet that you tighten and loosen. And they would make sure that the Palestinians in Gaza were just hungry enough to not raise alarms. They were counting calories and measuring what is allowed in to make sure that everyone remained hungry in Gaza, but not so hungry that it raised alarm bells in the international humanitarian world so that on October 6th, 2023, half of people in Gaza were food insecure and 80 percent depended on humanitarian aid.”

The Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food said, “this is an attempt to use starvation to displace people, to kill people, to annihilate people as an attempt to erase the Palestinians from history and from their land in order for Israel to fully annexe Palestinian territory. And we see that their annexation plan continues now into Lebanon.”

Arrojo-Agudo explained that because of population pressure on the costal aquifer, “the only way of having water for drinking water was the desalination plant. And an amount of water sold by Mekorot, the public owned company, Israeli company, to the Palestinians.”

He said, “with the beginning of the war, this water was cut off at the beginning completely and then, a little bit more or less, but cut it essentially and with a cutting of the energy, the desalination plants collapsed.”

For his part, Rajagopal said, “we need to back up a little bit from October of 2023, because the question of how much of Gaza has been destroyed should not give the mistaken impression of assuming that Gaza was fully built and intact before that. No part of Palestine, whether it’s East Jerusalem or West Bank or Gaza, have been exempt from a gradual and sometimes violent pummelling given by Israel using military force or using home demolitions, which have been a chief tool of occupation and land annexation, including settlement activity in the West Bank over decades.”

Special Rapporteurs are part of the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council and work on a voluntary basis. They are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent of any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

42 comments

  1. Excellent, data and facts driven statements by expert panellists. A must listen for all world leaders, all their citizenry, all civil society organizations, activists, journalists, MUST listen to this and try to wrap their brains around the HORRIFIC destruction Israel has brought upon Gaza !

  2. You have to also look at Hamas gunmen stopping and stealing food right off the aid trucks (video as it happened on youtube) which they consume and sell some to the Palestinians to whom it was destined for free. You have to also look at the hundreds of fully loaded trucks sitting there in GAZA undistributed (except for the thefts by Hamas) because drivers are afraid of what Hamas will do to them. UN can twist things around in their corrupted minds as they generally do, but millions of people have now seen the Hamas gunmen trying to steal the aid trucks and stopped by the IDF. How many of those Hamas gunmen are on UN payroll? If Israel pulls out, Hamas will continue shooting rockets daily into Israel. If Israel pulls out, ALL the aid trucks will be confiscated by Hamas and sold to the Palestinians. How can the UN come out with their daily diatribe about Israel without complete embarrassment? What a corrupt institute.

  5. Here is my idea to help Gaza. If the ordinary Palestinians would tell Israel where all the Hamas operatives and their tunnels are, Israel will get rid of them. Then Israel and an international Group (NOT UN) will go in, distribute food, water and medicines. Israel and that Group will help rebuild the housing, schools, hospitals – the infrastructure to make Gaza better than it was before. The local Palestinians will then choose their own political representatives to work with Israel and the Group to create their own Palestinian government free from Hamas. Israel and the Group will help Palestine to rebuild a strong economy. Israel will do this because Israel wants the Palestinians of Gaza to be peaceful neighbors and allow for trade and commerce between the two in time. All that the UN wants to do is to perpetuate the hostilities, keep the Palestinians as human shields, starve them and take the higher moral ground blaming Israel for the suffering. People, No more Hamas means no more Palestinian sufferings, it means no more Palestinian deaths as human shields – why do they not realize this?

  8. This all is being done in supervision of America and its allies who supports istael like Australia, canada, UK etc
    Muslims are being genocide by America and its supporters, millions of innocent Muslims have been killed in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon etc

  12. The great watchers, they're only watching that events and the truth of genocide doesn't turn the tide of global condemnation, the global economy, after buying the time to whitewash everything hoping the world will just forget and accept Israel's terrorism and genocide of Palestine, that the US funded the terrorist state of Israel as its proxy to justify wars throughout the middle east, repeatedly.

  13. Yeah.. but you gotto admit you speaking about housingRIGHTs that no-one else on earth has, is funny when there is no houses left.. we're in Norway, and WE can't afford housing..
    King
    Ragnar YAHUWAH

  14. why all these UN experts have never investigated the situation of the Israeli hostages ? or the crimes of Hamas ? how these Palestinians have no food but so much bombs and rpgs and rockets ?

  15. Dear brothers and sisters, the current generation holds the power to transform the world’s vision, overcoming the chains of selfishness and patriarchal structures that have dominated for so long. Let us imagine a future where financial and cultural conditioning is merely an aspect of our personal decisions, a perspective that fills us with hope. This change could lead us to a society where justice, life, and harmonious equality are not predetermined by external factors but are the result of conscious and deliberate choices.

    In this new paradigm, all living beings could coexist in balance, respecting the interconnectedness of life on our planet. The Apostle Paul exhorts us not to conform to this world but to renew our understanding. He calls us to a profound transformation, beyond mere adaptation to circumstances. He invites us to be agents of change, to challenge established paradigms, and to seek with creativity and goodwill new ways of understanding and acting in the world.

    This struggle is not only against external adversities but also against internal limitations that prevent us from seeing beyond what is considered immutable. The true survival of life in its entirety depends on our ability to imagine and build realities that reflect the fullness and purpose of our existence. It is a call to active hope, to faith manifested in works, and to love that tirelessly seeks the common good, beyond conventional recommendations or prophecies of cataclysms.

    We cannot lead the collective consciousness without dignity. Our spirit must consult the ancient wisdom of the planet’s collective subconscious. We must not limit ourselves to the hypothetical recommendations of supposed experts but be wise as responsible individuals in the context of the global community.

  16. So what does the small number of press representatives tell you about how the governments and media controllers care about the starvation of children and the sovereignty of the UN.

  18. Seems not just in one or two countries but all over the world there seems to be the same narrative.
    Starvation and occupation repetitive tactics used for thousands of years.

    Human Yet in the modern times or so called modern times this has continued with many of the same narrative and no ways to implement values for all humanity as the same.

    When structures are created and not utilizing their existing services for the good then that is a clear indicator of the contributing factors and enabling these problems.

  26. “Violence (ḥā·mās) shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders;

    but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation (Yə·šū·‘āh) , and thy gates Praise.”
    (Isaiah 60:18)

  27. How many Reports of severe violations do you have to have before taking real action on the grounds of Gaza? How many lives eliminated do you have to see? How many atrocities is enough? You are losing if not lost already all credibility on the world stage and its making your body irrelevant!

  31. Thank you for the emotional report. I feel the same way about it. It was the general assembly the decisions there led to it. It was like a worldwide decision to let the Gaza people die. Isreal obeyed the decisions of UN. Its a devastating tesult of UN reports and decisions and I vetoed in and it took to long to end it up. It is to low amounts of water there and food its about culture and having to many children and international antisemitism.

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