Press Releases
Bethlehem, 29 August 2025
Gaza continues to be starved to death by the Israeli regime in plain sight—and states are complicit. The UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) classification of famine in Gaza this week signifies a blistering indictment of the systematic failure of states to act, uphold their legal and moral obligations, and enforce accountability on the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime. Its unmistakably clear that the ongoing Israeli genocide and famine is product of states’ complicity by allowing starvation to be wielded as a weapon, and abandoning the Palestinian people to preventable death. By failing to impose sanctions, nor restoring the UN aid mechanism and re-instating UNRWA, governments and blocs, particularly the United States and the European Union are active enablers of Israeli genocide. The recent statements by the Netherlands and Sweden amount only to appeals for sanctions, not to their actual enforcement, despite the fact that both states could impose such measures unilaterally. The Israeli regime’s engineered famine is a direct outcome of states’ complicity and failure to act, in the service of Israeli genocide.
By allowing the banning and replacement of UNRWA, in favor of the US-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), states have not only failed their obligations to protect, but have contributed to the genocide by exacerbating the famine. The GHF operates out of four distribution “points,” that serve as death traps where nearly 1400 Palestinians have been killed attempting to access food. The installment of the GHF also serves to dismantle UNRWA, erase the refugee question, and further obstruct Palestinian’ rights, including return. President Donald Trump’s false promises of a “conclusive ending” to the genocide “within two to three weeks” are consequential. They buy more time for genocide and enable the Israeli regime’s escalation on the ground, including plans to further colonize Gaza City. The Israeli regime, confident in its impunity, carried out deliberate attacks on journalists, such as the ‘double tap’ strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which also served to prevent documentation of war crimes during the impending invasion.
With states unwilling to act and enabling the banning and dismantlement of UNRWA, it is not surprising that the Israeli weaponization of aid and starvation has reached unprecedented levels. Since 2 March 2025, UNRWA has been prevented from distributing aid in Gaza, deliberately blocked from fulfilling its mandate. At present, only an average of around 100 trucks altogether have been entering in the last two weeks, while 6,000 trucks of life-saving aid are ready to enter Gaza—but remain deliberately blocked. In July 2025 alone, more than 12,000 children were diagnosed as acutely malnourished—the highest monthly figure ever recorded. Current IPC assessments show that over half a million Palestinians in Gaza face famine-level starvation (IPC Phase 5), with over half the population in Emergency or Crisis levels of food insecurity. These figures and earlier warnings indicate that starvation in Gaza was, and is, a foreseeable and intended outcome of state policies that amount to complicity.
While the US co-perpetrates the genocide with the Israeli regime, the European Union (EU) has taken no action, even after famine alerts were presented at the UN as far back as February 2024. Rather than providing full political and financial support to UNRWA to sustain and increase its operation, the European Union (EU) hides behind false Israeli assurances that aid flow into the Gaza Strip would increase. Further, the EU confined itself to a perfunctory “review” of its Association Agreement. Under both international and EU law, the EU and its member states, are legally and morally obligated to impose comprehensive sanctions, including severing trade agreements with the Israeli regime, and ensure the unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid. Instead, compared to 2022, several EU member states such as Austria, Italy, and Germany decreased their contributions as of December 2024. Sweden halted its contributions, with the US having already cut their funding to the Agency at the beginning of 2024.
States have also opted to drop aid via airdrop pallets, a practice criticized by UNRWA commissioner Lazzarini: “If there is political will to allow airdrops – which are highly costly, insufficient and inefficient, there should be similar political will to open the road crossings.”At the same time, by defunding, suspending, or withholding support for UNRWA, states render themselves complicit in the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population. Yet, states are readily spending “100 times more” on inefficient and dangerous airdrops, instead of enabling sufficient and effective truck deliveries of aid that are waiting at the checkpoints. This catastrophic shortfall is the direct result of the Israeli regime’s siege, compounded by states’ refusal to take meaningful action to reinstate UNRWA and the UN led humanitarian aid system, using the airdrops to mask inaction and feign action taken.
The United Nations Secretary-General stated that the famine is “a man-made catastrophe, a moral indictment – and a failure of humanity itself.” At the bare minimum, safeguarding UNRWA’s role is essential—not only as Gaza’s humanitarian lifeline, but as the UN institution mandated to uphold the rights of Palestinian refugees. Despite the fact that 118 Member States, including all members of the UN Security Council, endorsed the “Statement of Shared Commitments on UNRWA,” they have done very little to put those commitments into practice. The Agency, recognized as “the backbone of all humanitarian response in Gaza” by these states is still banned from operations in Gaza and is facing a crushing financial deficit.
The continued enablement of the Israeli banning of UNRWA, and its replacement by GHF, cements states’ complicity in the famine, starvation and weaponization of aid. Further, by undermining UNRWA, states undermine the institution through which they are bound to uphold Palestinian refugees’ rights and fail to address the Israeli crime of their ongoing forced displacement, an act of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The obligations of states are clear: to take all measures to stop and reverse the Israeli and US engineered famine by providing unwavering political and financial support to UNRWA and impose comprehensive sanctions, such as severing the EU Association Agreement with the Israeli regime. Empty words, reviews, and false promises will not feed famine-inflicted Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, nor will they end genocide.