After presenting their annual reports to the General Assembly, the Special Rapporteurs on the rights to food, water, and housing Michael Fakhri, Pedro ArrojoAgudo, and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, respectively, today (18 Oct) discussed how these rights are being violated in Gaza.

Fakhri said his report “answers a very specific question; how was Israel able to starve 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza so quickly and so completely?” and noted that “we have never seen in modern history this speed of starvation ever.”

He explained that “this doesn't start on October 7th,” and pointed out that “from 2000 to 2023, Israel has a profound degree of control over Gaza.”

Fakhri said, “it's like a faucet that you tighten and loosen. And they would make sure that the Palestinians in Gaza were just hungry enough to not raise alarms. They were counting calories and measuring what is allowed in to make sure that everyone remained hungry in Gaza, but not so hungry that it raised alarm bells in the international humanitarian world so that on October 6th, 2023, half of people in Gaza were food insecure and 80 percent depended on humanitarian aid.”

The Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food said, “this is an attempt to use starvation to displace people, to kill people, to annihilate people as an attempt to erase the Palestinians from history and from their land in order for Israel to fully annexe Palestinian territory. And we see that their annexation plan continues now into Lebanon.”

ArrojoAgudo explained that because of population pressure on the costal aquifer, “the only way of having water for drinking water was the desalination plant. And an amount of water sold by Mekorot, the public owned company, Israeli company, to the Palestinians.”

He said, “with the beginning of the war, this water was cut off at the beginning completely and then, a little bit more or less, but cut it essentially and with a cutting of the energy, the desalination plants collapsed.”

For his part, Rajagopal said, “we need to back up a little bit from October of 2023, because the question of how much of Gaza has been destroyed should not give the mistaken impression of assuming that Gaza was fully built and intact before that. No part of Palestine, whether it's East Jerusalem or West Bank or Gaza, have been exempt from a gradual and sometimes violent pummelling given by Israel using military force or using home demolitions, which have been a chief tool of occupation and land annexation, including settlement activity in the West Bank over decades.”

Special Rapporteurs are part of the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council and work on a voluntary basis. They are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent of any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.