Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go down in history for “using hunger as a weapon” in the Gaza Strip, the chairman of an environmentalist group in the French Senate said on Wednesday.
In a speech to the Senate General Assembly, Guillaume Gontard said that history textbooks will say that Israel caused an explosion of violence in the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023.
Noting that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands has been warning since January that there is a risk of genocide in Gaza, Gontard recalled that EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell recently said that Gaza “has become the world’s largest open-air cemetery.”
Borrell also told the UN Security Council on Wednesday (13 March) that Israel is using hunger to wage war in Gaza and the lack of aid is a “man-made” disaster.
Gontard stressed that journalists and doctors have documented a situation in Gaza “akin to the apocalypse” and said more children have been killed in the enclave in four months than in four years worldwide, while regular bombardment and famine have made the region uninhabitable.
Israel has been waging a military offensive on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Palestinian resistance group Hamas on 7 October that killed about 1,200 Israelis.
Since then, nearly 32,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and more than 74,000 injured in Gaza amid widespread destruction and shortages of basic necessities. According to the UN, the Israeli war has displaced 85 per cent of Gaza’s population amid a brutal blockade, as well as severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine.
Israel is accused of genocide at the UN International Court of Justice. An interim judgement issued in January ordered Tel Aviv to ensure that its troops do not commit acts of genocide and to guarantee humanitarian aid to Gaza’s civilian population.
