US Gaza aid port plan 'absurd' and 'cynical': UN expert

A UN expert Friday criticised US efforts to boost humanitarian aid to Gaza, such as plans for a temporary port and recent air drops, which he said were "absurd" and "cynical" methods so long as military aid to Israel continues.
Amid warnings of looming famine five months into Israel's campaign against the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza, the US military has carried out air drops of meals into Gaza and plans a temporary port for aid imports on its Mediterranean coast.
Air drops in particular "will do very little to alleviate hunger malnutrition, and do nothing to slow down famine," Michael Fakhri, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told reporters in Geneva.
He warned of chaos as starving people joust for supplies. As for the port, he said no one had asked for it. He called the port and air drops methods of "last resort".
"The time when countries use air drops, and these maritime piers, is usually if not always, in situations when you want to deliver humanitarian aid into enemy territory," he said.
The US diplomatic mission in Geneva was not immediately available to respond to the remarks made late yesterday.
Fakhri, a Lebanese-Canadian law professor mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to document and advise on global food security, said such methods made little sense while Washington continues to provide military support to Israel.
US legislation envisages an additional $17.6bn in new military assistance to Israel as its war against Palestinians continues.
"That's more than allyship. That's a marriage... It's almost incomprehensible," he said of US support to Israel, calling the recent aid measures a "performance to try to meet a domestic audience with (US presidential) elections around the corner".
"That's the only rational coherent interpretation (for these aid announcements) because...from a humanitarian perspective, from an international perspective, from a human rights perspective, it is absurd in a dark, cynical way," he said.
Fakhri, who has been critical of Israel on social media, on Thursday told the Geneva Human Rights Council that Israel was destroying Gaza's food system as part of a broader "starvation campaign". Israel's envoy denies restricting aid into Gaza.
He said that Israel since last October had denied all fishers access to the sea and had "destroyed 75% of the fishing sector".
And this, he said, was after Israel already had "been strangling Gaza for 17 years".
That lenghty blockade has made the impact of the aid-cutoff since October 7 all the more dramatic, Fakhri said.
"We've never seen an entire civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely in modern history, and people's health is rapidly declining."
Meanwhile, the head of the European Commission said yesterday a maritime aid corridor could start operating between Cyprus and Gaza this weekend, part of accelerating Western efforts to relieve the humanitarian crisis in the war-ravaged Palestinian enclave.
Ursula von der Leyen's comments came a day after President Joe Biden announced plans for the US military to build a "temporary pier" on Gaza's Mediterranean coast.