With Gaza under a complete aid blockade by Israel for more than two months, Pakistan has called on the UN Security Council and act with “urgency” to end the suffering of the Palestinian people and bring the long-awaited justice to them.
“The humanitarian tragedy (in the Occupied Palestinian Territory) has reached catastrophic proportions,” Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, permanent representative of Pakistan to the UN, told the 15-member Council on Tuesday.
“We, this Council, and those most responsible, are being judged, and will be judged in posterity; Let us come together, and act, united, in the interest of peace, for the sake of humanity,” he said during a briefing on the humanitarian situation and the protection of aid workers in Gaza.
At the outset, Thomas Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said that “Israel is deliberately and unashamedly imposing inhumane conditions on civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
For more than 10 weeks, “nothing has entered Gaza – no food, medicine, water or tents”, he noted.
Fletcher urged the international community to reflect on what it will tell future generations about action taken “to stop the 21st century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza.”
He wondered, for example, if “we will use those empty words: ‘We did all we could,'” and urged the Council to act decisively to prevent genocide from happening.
In his remarks , Ambassador Asim, the Pakistani envoy, commended Fletcher for his “sobering and deeply troubling” briefing.
“What we are witnessing is not incidental – it is the systematic destruction of a civilian population; the deliberate use of starvation; the relentless siege; and the targeted and methodical dismantling of humanitarian architecture,” he said.
“This is something that Israel, the occupying power, is doing ‘deliberately and unashamedly’. as Mr. Fletcher has put it,” the Pakistani envoy pointed out.
“Over 2 million people, half of them children, are enduring the unendurable. Aid is blocked, hospitals have collapsed, and families are trapped amid rubble and despair. Famine is no longer looming – it is present. One in every three children under two years is acutely malnourished.”
Meanwhile, the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) snapshot released by WFP presents a grim reality, with 470,000 people in Gaza facing catastrophic hunger, and the entire population experiencing acute food insecurity, he said. The WFP has exhausted its last food stocks to support hot meals kitchens for families on 25 April. All 25 WFP-supported bakeries have been shut down as wheat flour and cooking fuel have run out, with over 71,000 children and 17,000 mothers urgently requiring treatment for acute malnutrition and 60,000 children need immediate medical care.
Ambassador Asim said that attacks on hospitals, aid convoys, humanitarian workers and UN staff, including the killing of 290 UNRWA personnel, had dangerously eroded the protection afforded under international humanitarian law.
The Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibit the starvation of civilians, attacks on medical facilities, obstruction of humanitarian aid and collective punishment, he stressed.
“Yet we are witnessing the inverse – the politicization and militarization of aid, the weaponization of starvation and the systematic destruction of humanitarian lifelines.” The Pakistani envoy unequivocally rejected the so-called militarized ‘aid coordination mechanism,’ which would reduce humanitarian access points from 400 to merely five tightly controlled hubs near military installations, saying it undermines and violates the cores humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality and risks transforming humanitarian aid into an instrument of coercion and forced displacement.
“It is totally unacceptable,” Ambassador Asim said, noting that the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) – which brings together some 15 UN entities and over 200 NGOs – had categorically denounced plans by Israeli officials to dismantle the existing aid distribution system affirming that it “contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy.”
In this regard, the Pakistani envoy called for a “permanent and unconditional” ceasefire, which he said was not just a precondition for aid, but a precondition for life. The blockade imposed since 2nd March must be lifted, and aid convoys and medical teams must be protected and allowed to operate freely and safely, he said. “The normalization of starvation as a weapon of war is a crime. Collective punishment must end, and accountability must be ensured.”
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, must be allowed to operate without obstruction, he said.
Ambassador Asim also called on the Security Council to address the root cause: the prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory.
