With Gaza under a complete aid blockade by Israel for more than two months, Pakistan has called on the UN Security Council to act with “urgency” to end the suffering of the Palestinian people and bring the long-awaited justice to them.
“The humanitarian tragedy (in the Occupied Palestinian Territory) has reached catastrophic proportions,” Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, permanent representative of Pakistan to the UN, told the 15-member Council on Tuesday.
“We, this Council, and those most responsible, are being judged, and will be judged in posterity; Let us come together, and act, united, in the interest of peace, for the sake of humanity,” he said during a briefing on the humanitarian situation and the protection of aid workers in Gaza.
At the outset, Thomas Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said that “Israel is deliberately and unashamedly imposing inhumane conditions on civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
For more than 10 weeks, “nothing has entered Gaza — no food, medicine, water or tents”, he noted.
Fletcher urged the international community to reflect on what it will tell future generations about action taken “to stop the 21st century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza.”
He wondered, for example, if “we will use those empty words: ‘We did all we could,’” and urged the Council to act decisively to prevent genocide from happening.
In his remarks , Ambassador Asim, commended Fletcher for his “sobering and deeply troubling” briefing.
“What we are witnessing is not incidental – it is the systematic destruction of a civilian population; the deliberate use of starvation; the relentless siege; and the targeted and methodical dismantling of humanitarian architecture,” he said.
Read more: Medecins du Monde condemns Israel’s use of hunger as ‘weapon of war’ in Gaza
“This is something that Israel, the occupying power, is doing ‘deliberately and unashamedly’. as Mr. Fletcher has put it,” the Pakistan envoy pointed out.
“Over 2 million people, half of them children, are enduring the unendurable. Aid is blocked, hospitals have collapsed, and families are trapped amid rubble and despair. Famine is no longer looming – it is present. One in every three children under two years is acutely malnourished.”
The Pakistani envoy unequivocally rejected the so-called militarized ‘aid coordination mechanism,’ which would reduce humanitarian access points from 400 to merely five tightly controlled hubs near military installations, saying it undermines and violates the cores humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality and risks transforming humanitarian aid into an instrument of coercion and forced displacement.
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