Humanitarian and international law have been undermined by a year of war against civilians in Gaza, according to the UN rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.
On 20 October, James Elder, spokesperson for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), condemned the continued attacks on civilians after Israeli airstrikes in Beit Lahiya killed dozens.
The war is affecting the population in a 'horrific way', he added.
More than 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing extremely critical levels of hunger, according to the UN. Seventy percent of crop fields and livelihoods have been destroyed during the Israeli military offensive.
The war, which has claimed 42,000 lives and left hundreds of thousands wounded, has also spread to the West Bank and Lebanon. Civilians as well as UN peacekeepers have been targeted by Israel's forces.
On Monday, the Israeli parliament has also approved a controversial bill to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), considered a lifeline for Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory.
The agency has condemned the Israeli parliament’s decision, calling the move “outrageous”.
UN leaders have called for a ceasefire and denounced starvation, mass displacements, atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity, like the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk.
In an op-ed published in The New York Review of Books released on 17 October, Human Rights Watch’s Programme Director Sari Bashi also detailed how the Israeli military’s actions in northern Gaza repeatedly risk the war crimes of forced displacement and using starvation as a weapon of war.
To discuss the implication on human rights and humanitarian work in Gaza but also beyond, this week, RFI spoke to Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian territories, for the International Report.
This week, Albanese has released her latest report on the situation in Gaza and all the the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, before presenting it in front of the UN General Assembly.
Albanese discussed with me the level of suffering, the role and failures of the United Nations and the international community, and underlined the urgency of securing a ceasefire.
"I've used the word catastrophe for the first time back in October 2023," Albanese told RFI, "when Israel had killed 8000, 6000 people in the first weeks of the conflict and destroyed the entire neighbourhoods, bakeries, churches, and targeted UN buildings and university."
"This is not the way wars are conducted," she added. "Israel occupies that land according to the International Court of Justice, unlawfully. So Israel occupies unlawfully a territory oppressing its people, who of course, retaliate. Then they wage a war against them. It doesn't work that way."
Albanese has advocated for the investigation and prosecution of the crimes that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups or individuals had committed against Israeli civilians on 7 October, at the same time, I've said justice must come in and be delivered or is not the answer because it's against international law.
"As we speak, Israel is running extermination raids, neighbourhood per neighbourhood in the areas that was already forcibly evacuated, ethnically cleansed of nearly 1 million people in the northern Gaza, only 400,000 people remained who have been starved, abused and bombed. What the people in Gaza have gone through is really unspeakable, and now it is emptying the land completely."
Western states make the argument that Israel has the right to protect itself.
"But is it protection?" Albanese asked.
"How is what Israel is doing going to make its citizens protected? This is the question. And the blindness at the political level is mind blowing."
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Audio version : https://www.rfi.fr/en/podcasts/international-report/20241101-un-rapporteur-says-israel-s-war-in-gaza-is-emptying-the-land-completely
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