Sanders condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for blocking humanitarian aid, and pointed to data from humanitarian groups and the UN that indicate one-third of Gaza’s population is going days without food, with children dying from malnutrition and hospitals collapsing under starvation.
“When mass death from starvation begins, it is difficult to reverse. Aid groups say Gaza faces a tidal wave of preventable death. This is the direct result of the Israeli government’s policies”, he said.
Stressing that Israel did not allow a single shipment of aid into Gaza from March 2 to May 19, Sanders said more than 1,000 Palestinians have been shot down while trying to get food aid in the last two months.
“Most of these deaths are the result of Israel’s replacement of the established United Nations distribution system with the untested Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose few distribution points have become death traps for Palestinian civilians, with near-daily massacres”, he added.
The GHF aid distribution sites, launched May 27 in Gaza, which also have US backing, have been described as “death traps” by critics.
“This is the reality: Having already killed or wounded 200,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, the extremist Israeli government is using mass starvation to engineer the ethnic cleansing of Gaza”, said Sanders.
