Israel calls EU's accusations it is using Gaza hunger as weapon of war 'outrageous'

Israel rejected as “false” and “outrageous” European Union High Representative Josep Borrell’s claim it was using starvation as a “weapon of war” in Gaza.

“There is no restriction on the amount of food and water that is allowed to be delivered into the Gaza Strip,” government spokeswoman Tal Heinrich told reporters in Israel. 

“We tried to better the mechanism of aid distribution across the Gaza Strip,” she said, noting that the trucks entering Gaza have excess capacity and that the backlog of aid is on the Gaza side of the border.

“The [distribution] mechanism has not been functioning as it should because they [it] was reliant on Hamas,” she said.

Heinrich spoke after Borrell delivered a blistering attack on Israel for its conduct in Gaza during a speech he delivered to the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday in which he said that in Gaza, “starvation” was used as a “weapon of war.”

“We are facing now a population fighting for their own survival,’ Borrell said as he painted a dire picture of the impact of the war in Gaza using Hamas data.

More than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the start of the war, while 1.8 million people have been displaced, and another half a million people are “on the brink of starvation,” Borrell said. Israel has stated that over 13,000 of the Gaza fatalities are combatants.

Israel's allies assert hunger crisis in Gaza, send aid by land and sea

He spoke as the international community, including Israel’s strongest allies, the United States and Great Britain, have asserted that there is a hunger crisis in Gaza. The United States has pushed to open Gaza’s air and sea space for the delivery of aid and has pressured Israelis to open additional land crossings into the enclave.

“Humanitarian assistance needs to reach Gaza, and the European Union is working as hard as it can to make this possible,” Borrell said.

He blamed Israel for the humanitarian crisis, noting that at issue was not “a natural disaster. It is not a flood. It is not an earthquake. It is man-made. 

“And when we look for alternative ways of providing support – by sea or by air – we have to remind that we have to do it because the natural way of providing support through roads is being closed, artificially closed,” Borrell said.

“Let humanitarian support flow into Gaza. Continue asking – and more than asking – Israel not to impede humanitarian to go through the natural way, which is by road,” Borrell stated.

He appeared to compare Israel to Russia when he said, “When we condemn this happening in Ukraine, we have to use the same words for what is happening in Gaza.”

Borrell also spoke in support of the United Nations Relief Works Agency, which is the main service provider for Palestinian refugees. Israel is working to close the agency after finding that at least 12 of its staff members had participated in the Hamas-led October 7 invasion of Israel in which over 1,200 people were killed and another 253 were taken hostage.

Israel has also said that at least 190 of its staff members are connected to Hamas. 

Borrell pushed back at criticism by UNRWA’s opponents that by recognizing as refugees the descendants of those Palestinians who fled from Israel during the 1948 War of Independence, it was creating a permanent and expanding class of refugees.

“Let me remind you something,” Borrell told the UNSC. “UNRWA exists because there are Palestinian refugees. It is not a present to the Palestinians; it is an answer to their needs. UNRWA exists because first, there were Palestinian refugees. We won't make these refugees disappear by making UNRWA disappear. They will still be there.

“In fact, there is only one way to make UNRWA disappear: making those refugees citizens of a Palestinian state that coexists with an Israeli state. Almost everybody agrees on that, but how can we make this solution a reality? 

“There is no magic solution. But maybe there are credible ways to try to achieve it. The two-state solution,” Borrell said.