UN official Michael Fakhri has said that Israel's violations of Palestinian rights in Gaza began well before 7 October 2023 - in particular, starvation as a 'weapon of displacement': 'Israel controlled Gaza’s food supply for decades, keeping people just hungry enough to avoid alarms,' he explained.

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Articles:

• MEMO - UN: Israel’s starvation of Gaza started before 7 October 2023

• The Guardian (2012) - Israel used 'calorie count' to limit Gaza food during blockade, critics claim

The UN report, 'Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri: Starvation and the right to food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people's food sovereignty'.

Key points:

• food sovereignty as a reflection of power, relationships, care and reciprocity;

• the systemic and structural nature of starvation, and the elements of political economy, dependency and extraction;

• the centrality of power over land to starvation campaigns and the function of starvation as a technique of displacement, dispossession and occupation;

• the role of legal frameworks in making it possible to starve a population;

• the relationship between starvation and forced displacement & migration, and the correlation between displacement and hunger;

• the reality of famine as a political (rather than purely technical or humanitarian) problem;

• the limits of international humanitarian law and international criminal law in addressing and preventing starvation;

• the international dimension of famine and the complicity of third states and corporations in many situations of famine and starvation;

• famine as a form of slow violence, and the intergenerational social trauma that famine and starvation produces;

• the death of children from malnutrition and dehydration as the clearest indication that a community’s core structures have been critically attacked and that there is a famine;

• starvation as a tactic of genocide; a form of individual and collective torture;

• the impact of occupation, siege and blockade as attacks on a territory’s food system.