GENEVA: A US plan for a temporary port off Gaza to bring in aid is a cynical play for a US audience and will not avert mass starvation, a UN rights expert said on Friday.
Announcing the initiative in his annual State of the Union address on Thursday, US President Joe Biden pleaded with Israel to let more aid into the blockaded territory.
“A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting in Gaza,” Biden told the US Congress.
But Michael Fakhri, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, dismissed the measure.
“No-one has asked for a maritime pier – not the Palestinian people, not the humanitarian aid community,” he told a briefing in Geneva.
US to build temporary port to deliver Gaza aid
More than five months into the war in Gaza, the UN has repeatedly argued that only massive and sustained aid delivery over land can help calm the ballooning humanitarian catastrophe.
Neither a pier, nor the increasing airdrops over Gaza would “prevent starvation and famine by any definition”, Fakhri said.
Such methods of aid delivery were normally only used as a last resort to get aid into enemy territory, he added.
That Israel’s main ally is resorting to such a measure “is absurd in a dark, cynical way”, he said.
He suggested the move was likely “a performance to try to meet a domestic audience, with elections around the corner”.
Fakhri is an independent expert mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, but does not speak on behalf of the United Nations.
He accused Israel of mounting an intentional “starvation campaign” in Gaza, where the UN has warned famine is “almost inevitable”.
The war in Gaza began after an unprecedented October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that resulted in about 1,160 deaths, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel has responded with a relentless offensive that the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said has killed more than 30,000 people, mostly women and children.
Speaking before the UN rights council on Thursday, Fakhri maintained that “Israeli is not only denying and restricting the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza” but also “destroying the food system in” the territory.
He said that Israel since last October had denied all fishers access to the sea and had “destroyed 75 percent of the fishing sector”.
And this, he said, was after Israel already had “been strangling Gaza for 17 years”.
That lenghty blockade has made the impact of the aid-cutoff since October 7 all the more dramatic, Fakhri said.
“We’ve never seen an entire civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely in modern history, and people’s health is rapidly declining.”
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