Vassily Nebenzia, ambassador of the Russian Federation to the UN, responded yesterday that the brief presented to the UN Security Council by the Office of the Commissioner of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), warning that 570,000 people faced “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” in Gaza “are terrifying.” Although OCHA presented a “White Note” with this information on Feb. 22, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) made the same forecast in a brief last December. Yet no effective action has been taken to respond to what was clearly what Nebenzia characterized as “a red line.”
Thus, he charged, members of the UNSC “share full responsibility for Israel’s use of hunger as a method of warfare.” “The data presented in the OCHA report are terrifying. There is no other way to describe the tragic statistic that of the 2.2 million severely malnourished Gazans, nearly 600,000—one in four—are a step away from starving to death. This is the largest proportion of people facing high levels of malnutrition ever recorded in the world. It is hard to realize that this is happening not in the Middle Ages, but in 2024 right before our eyes.”
