Rights Group Accuses Israel of ‘Starvation’ Tactic in Gaza War 

A boy plays in the rubble of destroyed houses and buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 18, 2023, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (AFP)
A boy plays in the rubble of destroyed houses and buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 18, 2023, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (AFP)
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Rights Group Accuses Israel of ‘Starvation’ Tactic in Gaza War 

A boy plays in the rubble of destroyed houses and buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 18, 2023, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (AFP)
A boy plays in the rubble of destroyed houses and buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 18, 2023, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (AFP)

A global rights group accused Israel on Monday of committing a war crime by starving people in the Gaza Strip who continued to face relentless attacks in the war with Hamas militants.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed no let-up in the bombardment and siege of the densely-populated coastal enclave, where buildings lie in ruins, hunger is rife, and health authorities say around 19,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Despite rising global pressure to protect civilians, who have nowhere to go, Israel is bent on eliminating the Hamas group behind an Oct. 7 rampage that killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.

US-based Human Right Watch (HRW) said Israeli forces were deliberately blocking delivery of water, food and fuel, razing agricultural areas and depriving Gaza's 2.3 million people of objects indispensable for their survival.

"The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip," it said in a report. "World leaders should be speaking out against this abhorrent war crime."

There was no immediate response to the HRW report from Israel, which has denied targeting civilians and says it is trying to facilitate aid to innocents while choking off supplies to thousands of Hamas fighters operating from tunnels.

Deaths mount

The HRW report came after Pope Francis accused Israel of "terrorism", deploring the reported killing by the Israeli military of two Christian women in a church complex.

Israel has not responded to his comments.

In the latest bombardments, 90 Palestinians died in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on Sunday, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry. Hamas Aqsa radio reported an attack on Gaza's main hospital, Al Shifa.

In Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, medics said 12 Palestinians had been killed and dozens wounded, while in Rafah in the south, an Israeli air strike on a house left at least four people dead.

The sound of the explosion was "as powerful as an earthquake", Mahmoud Jarbou, who lives nearby, told Reuters.

An Israeli tank shell hit the maternity building inside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, killing a 13-year-old girl named Dina Abu Mehsen, according to Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra.

Al-Qidra said that Abu Mehsen had previously lost her father, mother, two of her siblings, and one of her legs during a previous shelling.

The Israeli military released the names of four more soldiers killed in combat in Gaza, making it 126 dead in the strip since its ground invasion began in late October.

Aid needed

Residents reported gunfire between Israeli soldiers and Hamas fighters in various spots up and down narrow, coastal Gaza, with the militants saying they had launched a series of attacks.

Reuters was unable to verify the state of operations or claims from either side.

With Gazans desperate for basics, the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza has opened for aid trucks for the first time since the outbreak of war, officials said, adding to some supplies coming in via the Rafah crossing with Egypt.

The United Nations Security Council could vote on Monday on a proposal to demand that Israel and Hamas allow better aid access - via land, sea and air - with monitoring of deliveries.

Diplomats said the draft resolution hinges on final negotiations between the United States, a close ally of Israel with veto power in the council, and the United Arab Emirates, which has drafted the text.

Increased violence also continued in the occupied West Bank, where four Palestinians were killed in an ongoing Israeli army raid on the Faraa refugee camp, the Palestinian health ministry said on Monday.



Trump Administration Ends Some USAID Contracts Providing Lifesaving Aid across the Middle East

A USAID flag flutters outside, as the USAID building sits closed to employees after a memo was issued advising agency personnel to work remotely, in Washington, DC, US, February 3, 2025. (Reuters)
A USAID flag flutters outside, as the USAID building sits closed to employees after a memo was issued advising agency personnel to work remotely, in Washington, DC, US, February 3, 2025. (Reuters)
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Trump Administration Ends Some USAID Contracts Providing Lifesaving Aid across the Middle East

A USAID flag flutters outside, as the USAID building sits closed to employees after a memo was issued advising agency personnel to work remotely, in Washington, DC, US, February 3, 2025. (Reuters)
A USAID flag flutters outside, as the USAID building sits closed to employees after a memo was issued advising agency personnel to work remotely, in Washington, DC, US, February 3, 2025. (Reuters)

The Trump administration has notified the World Food Program and other partners that it has terminated some of the last remaining lifesaving humanitarian programs across the Middle East, a US official and a UN official told The Associated Press on Monday.

The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the US Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whom the Trump administration appointed to oversee and finish dismantling the US Agency for International Development, according to letters sent to USAID partners and viewed by the AP.

About 60 letters canceling contracts were sent over the past week, including for major projects with the World Food Program, the world’s largest provider of food aid, a USAID official said. An official with the United Nations in the Middle East said the World Food Program received termination letters for US-funded programs in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Some of the last remaining US funding for key programs in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and the southern African nation of Zimbabwe also was affected, including for those providing food, water, medical care and shelter for people displaced by war, the USAID official said.

The UN official said the groups that would be hit hardest include Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon. Also affected are programs supporting vulnerable Lebanese people and providing irrigation systems inside Syria, a country emerging from a brutal civil war and struggling with poverty and hunger.

In Yemen, another war-divided country that is facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, the terminated aid apparently includes food that has already arrived in distribution centers, the UN official said.

Aid officials were just learning of many of the cuts Monday and said they were struggling to understand their scope.

Another of the notices, sent Friday, abruptly pulled US funding for a program with strong support in Congress that had sent young Afghan women overseas for schooling amid Taliban prohibitions on women’s education, said an administrator for that project, which is run by Texas A&M University.

The young women would now face return to Afghanistan, where their lives would be in danger, according to that administrator, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration had pledged to spare those most urgent, lifesaving programs in its cutting of aid and development programs through the State Department and USAID.

The Republican administration already has canceled thousands of USAID contracts as it dismantles USAID, which it accuses of wastefulness and of advancing liberal causes.

The newly terminated contracts were among about 900 surviving programs that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had notified Congress he intended to preserve, the USAID official said.

There was no immediate comment from the State Department.