Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism – Vijay Prashad, says in his article that there are war crimes in recent war on Gaza.
He writes, SPEAKING in Rome, Italy, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme Cindy McCain said, ‘If we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas’ of Gaza, ‘famine is imminent. It’s imminent’. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the genocidal Israeli war, and the Palestinians in Gaza are on the verge of famine. Palestine’s Permanent Observer at the United Nations Riyad Mansour said that over half a million people are ‘one step away from famine’. ‘What it means for mothers and fathers to hear their babies and children cry of hunger day and night, no milk, no bread, nothing’, he added. Indeed, babies and children already have begun to die due to the famine-like conditions in Gaza. With Ramadan already begun, the situation is not only physically acute, but also mentally torturous.
He continues, In June 1977, at a conference on humanitarian law in armed conflict, the member states of the United Nations extended the Geneva Conventions (1949) to add Protocol II. Article 14 of that protocol says that ‘(s)tarvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited’. The belligerent power is ‘prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless’ any ‘objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works’. Two decades later, when the UN member states wrote up the Rome Statute (1998), they added in a section on starvation under the heading of war crimes (Article 8); ‘intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including illfully impeding relief supplies’ is a war crime. The Rome Statute is the treaty that formed the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has thus far remained silent on its obligations to act on its own founding document.
In the other part of his article we read, On February 29th, trucks with humanitarian aid came into the northern part of Gaza. When desperate people rushed to these trucks, Israeli soldiers fired on them and killed at least 118 unarmed civilians. This is now known as the Flour Massacre. In its aftermath, 10 UN experts released a strong statement, which noted, ‘Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys’. The UN special rapporteur for food, Michael Fakhri, who signed that statement, later expanded this accusation against Israel. ‘Israel’, he told the UN Human Rights Council, ‘has mounted a starvation campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza’. These statements are very pointed. Words such as ‘intentionally’ and phrases such as ‘starvation campaign’ directly accuse Israel of war crimes based on Protocol II and the Rome Statute.
At the end, Prashad says, International law is clear as daylight on the point of starvation as a war crime. There are no loopholes in Protocol II (1977) or in the Rome Statute (1998). Friends in Gaza are finding this Ramadan month to be more difficult than any previously. Starvation is their general condition. But, unlike with other Ramadans, there is no early morning meal (Suhoor) and no late-night meal (Iftar). There is only the perennial noise of Israeli fighter jets mirrored by the groans of hunger in their bellies
