ISRAEL has failed to comply with an International Court of Justice (ICJ) order to provide urgently needed aid to Gaza, instead intensifying its brutal military campaign, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today.
A quarter of the Palestinian territory’s 2.3 million people are currently facing starvation amid Israel’s ongoing war, with an average of just 57 aid lorries entering the region daily in the past month.
The United Nations has said that around 500 daily deliveries are needed to address the situation.
Last month, the top UN court responded to a South African petition by ordering Israel to do all it could to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide.
Israeli forces are preparing to expand their ground operation into the southern town of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, which is packed with 1.4 million Palestinians, many whom have fled there from other parts of the coastal strip in search of safety.
Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the army had presented to the war cabinet its operational plan for Rafah as well as plans to evacuate civilians from the battle zones. It gave no further details.
In its ruling last month, the ICJ ordered Israel to take six provisional steps, including “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel was also ordered to submit a report within a month on what it was doing to implement the measures.
Today marked a month since the court’s orders were issued and it was not immediately clear whether Israel had handed in such a report.
HRW said Israel was not complying with the court’s order on aid provision, citing a 30 per cent drop in the daily average number of aid lorries entering Gaza in the weeks following the ruling.
The human rights group added that Israel was not adequately facilitating fuel deliveries to hard-hit northern Gaza and blamed Tel Aviv for blocking aid from reaching the north, where the World Food Programme said last week that it had been forced to suspend aid deliveries because of increasing chaos in the isolated part of the territory.
HRW Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir said: “The Israeli government has simply ignored the court’s ruling and in some ways even intensified its repression, including [by] further blocking lifesaving aid.”
The Association of International Development Agencies, a coalition of over 70 humanitarian organisations working in Gaza and the West Bank, also said that aid deliveries had slowed since the court’s ruling, with almost none reaching areas north of Rafah.
Israel denies it is restricting the entry of aid and has instead blamed humanitarian organisations operating inside Gaza, claiming that hundreds of lorries filled with supplies sit idle on the Palestinian side of the main crossing.
The UN says it sometimes cannot reach the lorries at the crossing because it is too dangerous to do so.
The crisis has pushed a quarter of the population toward starvation and raised fears of imminent famine, especially in northern Gaza, which was the first focus of Israel’s ground invasion and where starving residents have been forced to eat animal fodder and search for food in demolished buildings.
“I wish death for the children because I cannot get them bread. I cannot feed my own children,” said Naim Abouseido in Gaza City.
“What did we do to deserve this?”
Bushra Khalidi of Oxfam said it had verified reports that children have died of starvation in the north in recent weeks, which she said indicated that aid was not being scaled up, despite the court ruling.
French aid groups Doctors of the World and Doctors Without Borders said that facilities belonging to them had been hit by Israeli attacks in the weeks following the court order.
