By Robert Fantina, World BEYOND War, August 29, 2025
Remarks in an online event on August 26.
My topic will be: The right to food, health, and life in Gaza; human narratives from the victims, and the role of the international community and NGOs in documentation and in pressing for accountability.
Good day. It is a privilege for me to be part of this distinguished panel today.
There can be no doubt that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in its genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. For anyone who may be uncomfortable with the use of the word ‘genocide’ in this context, I would refer them to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, a United Nations Special Committee Report, and the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, just for starters. All these organizations have declared, with more than ample evidence, that Israel is committing genocide.
I will refer now to Article 25, Section 1, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the foundation for my remarks today. It reads:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
The United States is a signatory to this declaration, but Israel is not.
So as hospitals are bombed, food rots on trucks outside the border – trucks that are blocked, by Israel from entering the Gaza Strip with their life-saving supplies – as residential building are bombed, along with schools and universities, and journalists are assassinated, where is the international community? Why are Palestinians apparently not entitled to the provisions guaranteed to all humans on the planet, as described by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Some members of the international community have stood up for international law and human rights. South Africa took the lead in petitioning the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to act. The following nations have either joined the petition, or have announced their intention of doing so: Nicaragua, Belgium, Colombia, Turkey, Libya, Egypt, Maldives, Mexico, Ireland, Chile, Spain, Brazil and Palestine itself. The ICJ has issued arrest warrants for the Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others. But the wheels of international just turn very slowly, and while they turn, Palestinians die, not only in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank as well. The atrocities occurring in the West Bank cannot be separated from the genocide in Gaza.
The Gaza Strip’s population of more than 2,000,000 people had been served by 36 hospitals prior to the start of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people there. As of May 22 of this year, only 19 remained operational or partly operational. Just last week, The World Heath Organization warned that the entire health system is at a breaking point. Another hospital was bombed on August 25, killing dozens of people. The bombing of hospitals is one of six ‘grave’ violations identified and condemned by the United Nations Security Council. The website of the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict includes this statement: “Direct physical attacks and the closure of these institutions as a result of direct threats have since 2011 been added as triggers for inclusion on the list of the Secretary-Generalof parties to conflict committing grave violations against children in armed conflict.”
In July of this year, more than 170 NGOs called on the U.S. and Israel to end its disastrous, deadly food-distribution program. Over 600 Palestinian men, women and children have been shot to death by Israeli soldiers, when the desperate victims were only trying to get food. These distribution sights are designed to play on the desperation of the starving victims, and to cause panic. A time is announced when food will be available. Massive crowds of starving people gather, awaiting the announcement that they can try to get food. When that time arrives, the people in the crowds are allowed 15 minutes to grab what they can. In some instances, the announced time coincides with an immediate evacuation order, thereby forcing the people – many of them children – to choose between grabbing some food and then not being able to evacuate in time, or remaining hungry as they flee to the next unsafe, designated area. Even without the evacuation orders, dozens of innocent people are shot daily, as the terrorist IDF forces claim they feel ‘threatened’ by desperate, hungry, weakened and unarmed people only trying to obtain food.
On such victim was a young man I had known for several years, having met through social media, Facebook to be specific. Occasionally, prior to the start of the genocide, I was able to provide him with some financial assistance.
Once this unspeakable genocide, being committed by the Zionist regime with the full complicity of many Western nations, especially the United States, began, we were in more frequent, albeit sporadic, contact. He had responsibility for his family: parents, siblings, children. Mahmoud sent me pictures of the various makeshift tents he and his family had to live in. They were displaced more then twenty times in twenty months. He was able, early on, to purchase a tent for his family with funds I was able to provide him, but could only keep it for a very limited time. An evacuation order came, giving him and the thousands of others in that particular area very little time to grab what they could, and flee.
On July 19, I heard from his brother that Mahmoud had been killed, trying to get food for his family. We all know the numbers; at least 61,000 people killed thus far, although some estimates put that number much higher. We read the numbers and are, rightly, horrified, but these are not just numbers, and that point was driven home to me on July 19. Sixty-one thousand people killed; I knew one of them and I am grieving from the comfort and privilege of my home in Canada. Hundreds of thousand of others are grieving as they flee U.S.-made bullets and bombs, never knowing who they will grieve for next or even if they will live to grieve for anyone.
Since the start of Israel’s brutal slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza, the Zionist regime has not allowed foreign journalist to enter the Gaza Strip. IDF terrorists have killed nearly 200 journalists since October, 2023. The Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, Article 79,states, in part, that “Journalists engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflict shall be considered as civilians within the meaning of Article 50, paragraph 1.” That particular article defines non-civilians as members of the military. So journalists have the same protections as civilians, and Israel does, in fact, treat civilians and journalists the same: they are all slaughtered without hesitation.
And how extensive is the slaughter of journalists? According to a report from Foreign Policy in April of this year, the genocide in Gaza “…has killed more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined.”
Where is the so-called ‘red line’ for the world’s governments? How long can Western government officials – I do not refer to them as ‘leaders’ – ignore the will of the people, who gather in the millions, and have done so continually for nearly 2 years, to protest genocide? How long can they ignore the evidence that is right in front of them, that is documented by highly-respected human-rights organizations? How long can they violate their own laws by supplying weapons and diplomatic cover to the Zionist regime to continue its genocide?
It has been said that, if you ever wondered what you would have done during the Nazi Holocaust, it is what you are doing now. History judges the Hitler regime as a savage one, from which the very term ‘genocide’ was created. In twenty years, Benjamin Netanyhu, Donald Trump, Canada’s Mark Carney and so many others will be vilified, exposed as the monsters they are, guilty of mass murder on a scale seldom seen. This is not to minimize the other horrific genocides of our lifetime such as in Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Myanmar and other sites. Those victims deserve the same recognition as the Palestinians. The only difference is the fact that today, from Palestine, people around the world can see what is happening in real time.
We must, as a society, continue to act, to assure that this current genocide ends, that those responsible for it – from government officials to individual soldiers – are held accountable. Until we are successful, the unspeakable suffering will continue.
Thank you.
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