The comments came after the United Nations halted food distribution among tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the besieged Gaza Strip after demonstrators protesting aid cuts stormed a UN compound. On Thursday, dozens of people in Gaza forcefully entered the office of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the blockaded Palestinian territory, calling for the reinstatement of a monthly allowance to poor Palestinian families.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Adie Mormech, human rights activist, to further discuss the issue. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Adie Mormech, I am going to take the question that that resident of Gaza just posed there, why has this happened at this point in time in terms of the aid not coming through to the poor people of Gaza who are under this crippling siege?
Mormech: Well the UNRWA made the announcement that they are going to cut some of the supplies to the members of the Palestinian refugee population.
Obviously there are, over eighty percent of people are sadly dependant on aid in Gaza and it is the vital food stuffs that are those that are provided such as cooking oil, such as rice, such as sugar, such as flour, such as bread and there is an announcement that this would be cut.
Now the people demonstrating were from some of the most impoverished areas of Gaza such as Jebaliah refugee camp and Shatti camp and they were not only angry but they were desperate because without this aid there can't be some of the most basic life expected ways of living allowed for Palestinians in those areas.
It is serious, serious poverty and it has been accounted for by all the major organizations here including United Nations, including even organizations like the World Bank.
This is a travesty and obviously people were gathering to demonstrate this. The whole picture is a sad one in Gaza when you have a recent attack on Gaza which also attacked a lot of civilian infrastructure causing more difficulties for the Palestinians here and then on top of that you have the United Nations deciding to cut aid.
Now the framework in Gaza as it stands is that UNWRA is one of the major NGOs providing this aid, the same with all other NGOs here. The aid is only structured such that they comply with the normalcy of occupation and siege.
Now if only the United Nations itself would take action against Israel's many crimes against humanity, it has violated more United Nations resolutions than any other country as well as many different panels, United Nations panel in September last year where called for immediate lifting of the siege and how it was choking the population.
The Red Cross has done the same. The United Nations Human Rights Council has called it collective punishment which is a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention and yet on the political level the United Nations is nothing while the NGOs create this sense of dependency amongst Palestinians because there is no hope politically.
This is not an environmental disaster. This aid coming in is being funded by different organizations and the people working for these organizations at the top are internationals that are getting a lot more wages than anybody else. It creates an NGO industry and creates this dependency, the fuss and it is a horrific fuss is that the dependency is only brought about because the lack of political action at the United Nations at the level of Security Council, at the level of other different...
In fact United Nations actually had a report on the Goldstone Report said Israel is committing crimes against humanity and war crimes. The same is true about collective punishment as United Nations crime against humanity and yet we see here now the last bit of scraps that is being given to Palestinians due to the UN's own impotency on a political level is now being reduced. So where do the Palestinians go then?
These are refugees, these are United Nations registered refugees and they did not just come out of the ground. It is not an environmental disaster. They were forced from their homes, they were ethnically cleansed whether it was 1948 when Israel was founded on the ruins of the homes of these refugees or whether it is 1967 or the thousand and thousand of Palestinians that have been forced from their homes ever since.
So it is an absolute disgrace frankly that they should reduce aid and coupled with United Nations policy generally of supporting all of the crimes that Israel has carried out despite the continuous reports by UN agencies that say that Israel is carrying out war crimes against the Palestinians and creating the impoverishment and the desperation here in the Gaza Strip and the five year blockade again collective punishment which UN agencies have described as such.
Comment: To put the above into context, see: Israel's formula for a starvation diet
Six and a half years go, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian national elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel's planned response. "The idea," he said, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."
Although Dov Weisglass was adviser to Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the day, few observers treated his comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterisation of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave.
Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy. After a three-year legal battle by an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose its so-called "Red Lines" document. Drafted in early 2008, as the blockade was tightened still further, the defence ministry paper set forth proposals on how to treat Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day.