EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war” and accused the country of blocking land routes that are the best way to deliver food to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing starvation in the Gaza Strip.
Borrell told the UN Security Council last night that humanitarian aid must be delivered to Gaza, where the crisis is man-made and there are no natural disasters, floods or earthquakes.
“It’s a man-made crisis and when we look for alternative ways to provide support by sea or air, we have to do it because the natural support roads are closed, actually artificially closed and starvation is used as an extended arm of war,” said Borrell.
He said that such practice was condemned in Ukraine and that the same words must be used in Gaza. The World Food Program yesterday delivered food to northern Gaza for the first time since February 20, the United Nations announced.
After checking at the Israeli border crossing Kerem Shalom, six trucks with humanitarian aid entered Gaza.
Aid organizations have been struggling to deliver aid to the isolated area for months, although some private convoys have managed to deliver food. Borrell said the EU was awaiting the results of three investigations into Israeli allegations that 12 employees of the EU’s Palestine Refugee Agency (UNRWA) participated in the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas in southern Israel.
He, however, stressed that UNRWA exists only because there are Palestinian refugees and if it disappears there will still be refugees, he said. “Actually, the only way for UNRWA to disappear is for these refugees to become citizens of a Palestinian state that coexists with the Israeli state,” concluded the high representative of the EU.
The first step to achieve this is for the UN Security Council to unanimously adopt a resolution supporting a two-state conflict resolution and “defining general principles that can lead to that result,” he said.
He emphasized the broad support for such a solution. “It would be a wonderful opportunity to show that our principles are not empty words,” Borrell said, Beta news agency reports.
