Biden’s Gaza port plan election stunt, UN expert says
A UN rights expert dismisses a US plan to set up a so-called port allegedly aimed at facilitating entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, which is enduring a genocidal Washington-backed war by the Israeli regime.
Delivering his State of the Union address to Congress, US President Joe Biden said earlier that he had ordered the country’s military to set up the port on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. “A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting in Gaza,” Biden said.
Addressing a briefing in Geneva on Friday, however, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri suggested that the move was likely “a performance to try to meet a domestic audience, with elections around the corner.”
“No-one has asked for a maritime pier -- not the Palestinian people, not the humanitarian aid community," Fakhri said.
Neither a pier, nor recent airdrops of aid by the United States into Gaza -- which Palestinians and their supporters have scoffed at as theatrical -- would “prevent starvation and famine by any definition,” he said.
Such methods of aid delivery were normally only used as a last resort, he pointed out.
That the US, Israel's main ally, was resorting to such a measure “is absurd in a dark, cynical way,” the expert said.
The comments came as more than 30,800 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have died in the war so far.
Since its onset on October 7, the military onslaught has enjoyed untrammeled political, military, and intelligence support on the part of the United States.
Fakhri, meanwhile, denounced Israel for mounting “a starvation campaign" in Gaza, where the UN has warned famine is "almost inevitable.”
Concomitantly with the war, the regime has been employing a near-total siege against Gaza that has reduced the flow of water, foodstuffs, electricity, and medicine into the coastal sliver into a trickle.
“I think it is fair to say now that Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he said, adding, “Every single person in Gaza is hungry right now.”
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