GENEVA, 18 September 2003 — A UN human rights expert is preparing to submit a report to the UN General Assembly that charges Israel of triggering a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Palestinian territories, newspaper reports said yesterday. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, said in a draft report that the Israeli military is preventing Palestinians reaching food and water with restrictions on movement in the territories, according to Swiss newspaper Le Temps and news agency ATS.
“The humanitarian catastrophe that is emerging in the Occupied Territories must be reversed,” the Swiss sociologist and UN expert was quoted as saying in the draft. “There can be no justification for harsh internal closures that prevent people from having access to food and water, otherwise the imposition of such military measures are amounting to what has been called a ‘policy of starvation’”, he said. Ziegler warned that closures and curfews were “resulting in a deterioration in malnutrition and poverty levels “ for Palestinian civilians. “Provoking hunger and malnutrition as a side effect of security measures is totally unacceptable and disproportionate and constitutes collective punishment”, the draft said.
Ziegler said that a future Palestinian state should not be “cut up into separate ‘bantustans’” — a reference to all-black enclaves in apartheid South Africa with limited autonomy — and called on Israel to end “obstruction of humanitarian relief services”.
The draft report was written following a visit by Ziegler to the Palestinian Territories in July, which included meetings with Israeli government officials in Tel Aviv and with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
