Middle East crisis live: starvation being used as a weapon, says EU official
It has just gone 9.30am in Gaza and Tel Aviv. This is our latest Guardian live blog on the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis.
EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has criticised the lack of aid entering Gaza as a “manmade” disaster, telling the UN security council that hunger was being used as a “war arm”.
“This humanitarian crisis … is not a natural disaster, is not a flood, is not an earthquake, it is manmade,” said Borrell at UN headquarters in New York on Tuesday, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The EU official has repeatedly criticised Israel over its conduct during the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
“Starvation is being used as a war arm,” he said, adding that “when we condemn this happening in Ukraine, we have to use the same words of what’s happening in Gaza.”
More on that story in a moment, but first, here are the other latest developments:
A Palestinian boy has been killed by Israeli border police at a refugee camp in East Jerusalem in the first such fatality in the Israeli-annexed territory during Ramadan. The child – who was variously reported as being 12 or 13 years old and named as Rami Hamdan al-Halhouli by local media – suffered a fatal gunshot wound during clashes between residents of the Shuafat refugee camp and police.
A Spanish aid ship was en route to Gaza on Wednesday, opening a new maritime corridor intended to allow deliveries of desperately needed food. In a sign of worsening humanitarian conditions, the territory’s health ministry says 27 people have died of malnutrition and dehydration, most of them children.
The US may urge partners and allies to fund a privately run operation to send aid by sea to Gaza that could begin before a much larger US military effort, three people familiar with the planning and a US official told Reuters. If funding is secured, the plan could bring ashore large amounts of aid in a matter of weeks and could be faster than the US military’s floating pier system that the Pentagon says could take up to 60 days to become operational.
More children have been reported killed in the war raging in Gaza than in four years of conflict around the world, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday. “Staggering. The number of children reported killed in just over 4 months in Gaza is higher than the number of children killed in 4 years of wars around the world combined,” Philippe Lazzarini said on X. UN numbers figures show that 12,193 children were killed in conflicts worldwide between 2019 and 2022.
Fresh bombardments could be heard in southern Gaza, an AFP journalist said early on Wednesday, and the territory’s health ministry reported another 70 people killed in overnight strikes.
EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, warned that the starvation of people in Gaza cannot be allowed to happen, amid reports of children dying of malnutrition and mothers giving birth to underweight babies because of a lack of food. “The situation on the ground is more dramatic than ever, and it has reached a tipping point. We have all seen the reports of children dying of starvation. This cannot be,” she told the European parliament in an address.
Israeli strikes on eastern Lebanon killed two people on Tuesday, a security source said, in escalating tit-for-tat fire with the powerful Hezbollah group that has raised fears of spiralling violence. A Lebanese security source, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media, said two people were killed and 12 others wounded in the latest strikes. The raids destroyed a building in Sarain, less than 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Baalbek, a key Hezbollah bastion near Lebanon’s border with Syria, while another hit a building in the nearby town of Nabi Sheet, the source added.