Human Rights Watch on Monday accused the Israeli government of intentionally starving civilians in Gaza as part of its offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory.

“The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime,” the group charged in a report.

“Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival,” it added.

Human Rights Watch called for an immediate cessation of using starvation as a weapon and urged the international community, including the United States, to intervene. According to HRW, intentionally depriving civilians of essential resources is considered a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

HRW reported that, before hostilities, approximately 1.2 million out of Gaza's 2.2 million residents were expected to face severe food insecurity, with over 80 percent relying on humanitarian aid.


In response, the Israeli government accused HRW of being an “anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli organization,” asserting that HRW failed to condemn the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli citizens.

Following months of fierce bombardment and fighting, most of Gaza's population has been displaced and people are grappling with shortages of food, water, fuel, and medicine. Israel recently approved the “temporary” delivery of aid to Gaza via the Kerem Shalom crossing. On Sunday, the first humanitarian aid convoy entered Gaza since Israel's approval.

Only ten percent of essential food supplies reaching Gaza since the beginning of the conflict, the region now confronts a significant shortfall in food resources, leading to widespread hunger as nearly the entire population urgently requires food assistance, UN World Food Program has pointed, on November 16.

“Rather than insisting on respecting the Palestinian people's basic right to eat and drink water, we are living through this dystopian reality that excludes Palestinians from the basic, most basic rights afforded to all human beings,” said Riyad al-Maliki, Palestinian Foreign Minister at a meeting in Geneva to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Miroslava Salazar, with AFP