The Government Press Office in Gaza, based on documented evidence and facts, denounced the army’s attacks on relief facilities, warehouses, bakeries and charities.

The agency criticized the use of starvation as a weapon of war, which it considered a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, in particular Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and Article 28 of the Rome Statute.

Such acts not only constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, but also crimes of genocide, he stressed.

The deliberate deprivation of the basic necessities of life in Gaza, especially food, has resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and exposed hundreds of thousands to the real risk of starvation.

The famine in the territory should not be seen as an incidental military policy or a by-product of war, but rather as a systematic approach of a collective punitive nature, directed against a segment of the population protected by international law, the Office said.

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