Blockade Has Become ‘Tool of Extermination’

UN: 90% of Gaza’s Population Forcibly Displaced by Israel

Date: 16 May 2025 - 22:22

News ID: ۱۳۹۵۹۱

GAZA (Dispatches) – Around 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million population has been forcibly displaced by the Zionist regime’s ongoing war on the enclave, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Friday.
As Palestinians mark the 77th anniversary of their expulsion from their towns in historical Palestine after attacks by Zionist gangs and the creation of the occupation the Zionist regime, UNRWA said: “In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their towns and villages. These events are known as the Nakba.”
“77 years later, Palestinians continue to be forcibly displaced.”
The refugee agency said that the Israeli war has forced 90 percent of the population to flee their homes.
“Some have been displaced 10 times or more.”
Since October 2023, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal aggression on the Gaza Strip, killing more than 53,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Human Rights Watch’s interim executive director said on Thursday the occupying regime’s eight-week food, water and humanitarian blockade on Gaza has “become a tool of extermination.”
“Hearing Israeli officials flaunt plans to squeeze Gaza’s two million people into an even tinier area while making the rest of the land uninhabitable should be treated like a five-alarm fire in London, Brussels, Paris, and Washington,” said HRW’s Federico Borello.
“Israel’s blockade has transcended military tactics to become a tool of extermination.”
HRW criticized the Zionist regime’s plans to demolish what remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and concentrate the Palestinian population into a tiny area as “an abhorrent escalation of its ongoing crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and acts of genocide”.
The human rights organization also said that the 153 states that had signed up to the Genocide Convention were liable for failing to act.
It said “a more robust response” was needed from governments and institutions and singled out the United States, France, Germany, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, saying they could do more such as end weapons sales, military assistance and diplomatic support to Israel, impose sanctions on Zionist regime officials, and consider suspending bilateral agreements.
“States that are party to the Genocide Convention committed themselves not just to punish genocide, but also to prevent it from taking place,” said Borello.
“Failing to act to stop Israeli authorities from starving civilians in Gaza and further rendering it unlivable flies in the face of the very purpose of the convention.”