A month ago, the International Court of Justice in The Hague said Israel must do everything to prevent genocidal acts in their military assault on Palestinians in Gaza.
But according to human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Israel “failed to take even the bare minimum steps to comply”.
The number of trucks decreased by 40 percent since the ICJ ruling, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
President Biden has been pushed to ordering air drops from U.S. military planes of food and supplies.
Most experts say it is a totally ineffective way of getting food to the people who need it.
Meanwhile Biden refuses to call for a permanent ceasefire.
At least 112 Palestinians were killed and more than 750 others were injured on Thursday after Israeli troops opened fire on civilians gathered at a convoy of food trucks southwest of Gaza City, Palestinian health officials said.
Israel denied it was to blame, of course, saying that many victims were run over by aid trucks in a rush to obtain food.
The massacre comes as the UN warns of an “almost inevitable famine” in southern Gaza amid increasing reports of children dying of starvation.
The murderous attack by the IDF on those desperately seeking food will go down in history as “the flour massacre.”
Gaza is seeing “the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world”, Carl Skau, deputy head of the World Food Programme, told the UN Security Council on February 28th.
“One child in every six under the age of two is acutely malnourished,” he said, adding that UNRWA – the Palestinian UN Relief and Works agency – is ‘indispensable' to averting a famine.
The agency is the main provider of aid into Gaza, particularly during this war. But major country donors have frozen funding to the agency amid Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA staffers participated in the October 7 attacks.
On January 26, Israel accused 12 UNRWA staffers of directly and indirectly aiding Hamas in the October attack inside Israel.
As a result, several Western countries moved to defund the UNRWA until an investigation reveals the accuracy of the claims.
Israel prepared a six-page dossier, which was shared with the Canadian government to back its claims of UNRWA's affiliation with the October 7 operation.
The Canadian government, however, found no evidence of any ties linking UNRWA to Hamas.
Sources told CBC News that Israel reiterated its claim, but provided zero evidence to factually prove it.
The United Kingdom's Channel Four also reviewed the file, which was initially sent to the British government after it had also opted to defund UNRWA, and drew the same conclusion: Israel provided no evidence to back its accusations.
Following The Flour Massacre Israeli officials denied that civilians had been fired on. Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said that people were trampled to death or injured during a fight to take supplies off the trucks.
Eye witnesses report something entirely different.
Mohammed has been documenting Israel’s war on Gaza since it began on October 7 in response to Hamas’s deadly cross-border attack.
As soon as he heard about the shootings he rushed to Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, where many of the injured were taken.
He photographed an injured boy lying on a stretcher and corpses in white body bags, blood soaking through the wrappings.
“They described it as the flour massacre,” he said.
Medics at Al-Shifa told him that children were amongst the hundreds of dead and injured.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Dr. Michal Feldon, a senior pediatrician at Shamir Medical Center, recalled:
We were raised on stories of the Holocaust; about people who stole moldy bread, who tried to assuage their hunger with potato peelings; about mothers who starved, literally, so that their children could eat. We are, after all, a haunted nation, whose DNA contains an existential dread of food shortages and all their implications.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, during World War II itself, one of the most extensive and well-documented studies on the physiological and psychological effects of hunger was conducted by a team of Jewish physicians who were imprisoned in the ghetto, led by Dr. Israel Milejkowski. They were able to demonstrate the significant damage that occurs when caloric intake drops below 500 calories per day (sometimes around 200 calories per day) in children and in adults.
Writing last December even before The Flour Massacre, Dr. Feldon wrote:
Here on the home front, at the height of the war, people continue to dine in restaurants, to order lavish deliveries through Wolt; extravagant food packages with branding from celebrity chefs and restaurants are sent to soldiers at the front; soldiers' families are generously dined, if not wined, at the state's expense.
And just over the border, about half of the population of the Gaza Strip suffers from severe or extreme hunger, and that 9 out of 10 households in the northern Gaza Strip had spent at least one full day and night without food.