UN demands immediate suspension of Israel's Gaza plan

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The United Nations (UN) demanded this Friday that the Israeli plan for military control of the Gaza Strip be “immediately suspended”.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, defended in a statement that the plan, approved this Friday morning by Israel, "goes against the decision of the International Court of Justice that Israel must end its occupation as soon as possible, against the implementation of the agreed two-state solution and against the right of the Palestinians to self-determination."

Israel's Government Security Cabinet has approved a military plan proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to occupy Gaza City in the north of the enclave.

Volker Türk believes that “this new escalation [in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] will lead to even more massive forced displacement, more deaths, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction and atrocious crimes.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights calls on the Israeli government to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip “without obstacles,” “instead of escalating the war,” to save civilian lives.

The hostages, kidnapped during the attack carried out on October 7, 2023 by Hamas on Israeli territory, “must be released immediately, and without demands, by the Palestinian armed groups,” Volker Türk also demanded.

“Palestinians arbitrarily detained by Israel must also be released immediately and without demands,” the UN official added.

The most recent phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered by attacks led by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on October 7, 2023, in southern Israel, which caused around 1,200 deaths and more than two hundred hostages.

Since then, more than 60,000 Gazans have died, almost half of them children and women, and more than 150,000 have been injured, according to health authority records, which the UN considers reliable.

At least 198 of the deaths, including 96 children, were due to hunger and malnutrition, according to a tally released by local authorities on Thursday.

Most of the 198 deaths occurred in recent weeks, after months of blocking the entry of humanitarian aid by Israel, which controls all access to that territory.

Between March 2 and May 19 the lockdown was total, and is now very limited.

Two dozen UN experts, including the rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, demanded on Thursday that Israel immediately restore unrestricted access for UN humanitarian agencies to the Gaza Strip.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) are among the organizations named in a joint statement released in Geneva, Switzerland.

Experts have warned that more than 500,000 people, or a quarter of the population, face hunger and 320,000 children under the age of 5 are at risk of acute malnutrition.

“Starvation has been used as a weapon of savage war and constitutes a crime under international law,” they said.

The UN has long declared the territory to be plunged into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 2.1 million people in a "catastrophic famine situation" and "the highest number of victims ever recorded" by the organization in studies on food security in the world.

At the end of last year, a special UN commission accused Israel of genocide in Gaza and of using starvation as a weapon of war—an accusation that was quickly refuted by the Israeli government, but without presenting any arguments.