Ten Palestinians have died of starvation or malnutrition over the past 24 hours due to the deliberate famine created by Israel in Gaza, bringing the death toll from the famine to 313, including 119 children.
The latest deaths follow the official declaration of a famine in parts of Gaza by the UN-affiliated body that monitors mass hunger.
Remarks delivered Wednesday before the United Nations Security Council revealed the horrifying toll of the deliberate famine carried out by Israel, with the direct support of the United States and indirect support of all imperialist powers.
Addressing the United Nations Security Council, Joyce Msuya, the UN’s deputy humanitarian chief, said, “Over half a million people currently face starvation, destitution, and death.” Msuya added, “By the end of September, that number could exceed 640,000. Virtually no one in Gaza is untouched by hunger.”
She noted that over 130,000 children under the age of five are at acute risk of malnutrition. “This famine is not a product of drought or some form of natural disaster,” she said. “It is a created catastrophe—the result of a conflict that has caused massive civilian death, injury, destruction, and forced displacement.”
Msuya continued:
Last month, over 100 Palestinians, on average, were killed every day, according to estimates by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, nearly twice the average daily toll recorded in May. In the same period, some 800,000 people were newly displaced, pushed into overcrowded areas that lack shelter and other essentials.
In a later address to the United Nations, Save the Children chief Inger Ashing accused Israel of creating an “engineered” famine. “The Gaza famine is here. An engineered famine. A man-made famine,” she said. “Children in Gaza are systematically being starved to death. This is starvation as a method of war in its starkest terms.”
She described clinics packed with malnourished children, where “Children do not have the strength to speak or even cry out in agony. They lie there emaciated, quite literally wasting away.”
She explained, “Once the total siege began in March, children would increasingly tell us they wish for food, for bread. These past few weeks, more and more children have shared that they wish to be dead.”
Following these remarks, every member of the United Nations Security Council, excluding the United States, voted in favor of a statement implicitly alleging that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. “The use of starvation as a weapon of war is clearly prohibited under international humanitarian law. Famine in Gaza must be stopped immediately,” the joint statement declared.
On the part of France, Germany and the UK the declaration is completely hypocritical. The governments of all of these countries have repeatedly justified the Gaza genocide on the grounds that Israel has the “right” to defend itself against the people whose land it illegally occupies.
In fact, Israel has no more “right” to wage war in Gaza than it does to starve the Palestinians. Both acts are completely criminal, and the pro-forma declarations of the imperialist powers declaring their shock at the deliberate mass starvation of the population is nothing more than an effort to publicly distance themselves from the crimes they have sponsored and enabled.
Israel continued its onslaught on Gaza City Wednesday, with tanks advancing further into the city. Israeli airstrikes and shelling killed over 76 people over the course of 24 hours, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Late Tuesday, Israeli tanks assaulted the Ebad-Alrahman neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Gaza City, shelling houses and forcing residents to flee.
Israeli forces killed 51 Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday, bringing the official death toll of the genocide to over 62,895.
In a post on Wednesday, Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee declared that the “evacuation of Gaza City is inevitable.”
On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump held a meeting nominally focused on the administration’s plans for Gaza. While the White House provided no details, among the participants was former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose staff has been involved in the Trump administration’s plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
In an interview with Fox News, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said that Trump’s plans would be implemented “before the end of this year.”
In February, Trump presented his plan to “own” the Gaza Strip, “level it out” and send the Palestinian people to “other countries.”
In June, the Financial Times reported on a secret strategy document drawn up by the Boston Consulting Group, a major US corporate consulting firm, for “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza. In a follow-up article, the FT revealed that the plan was created with the involvement of staffers from Tony Blair’s office.
Blair’s participation in the plans to ethnically cleanse, occupy and annex Gaza makes clear the fraudulent character of the criticisms made by the imperialist powers of Israel’s starvation policy. In reality, the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza are made not just in Washington but in London, Paris and Berlin.