For those in the West, hunger is often just the familiar feeling of a growling stomach between meals — in Gaza, it has become a strategic weapon of slow, systematic and deadly destruction, writes MARC VANDEPITTE

IN JANUARY, Mina Naguib and the crew on board the civil migrant-rescue ship Sea Watch 3 witnessed an EU-sanctioned breach of international human-rights law.
“On the morning of the 9th, early in the morning, we heard information of a boat in distress,” says Naguib, an emergency-medicine doctor based in Manchester who was volunteering as a medic with the German charity Sea Watch.
But by the time the Sea Watch 3 arrived at the co-ordinates, the so-called Libyan Coastguard was in the process of intercepting the boat and, presumably, returning the refugees on board to the humanitarian disaster they’d risked their lives to escape.

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Mr Smalls and 13 other Freedom Flotilla Coalition activists who tried to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza aboard the Handala ship remain in detention and on hunger strike