GENEVA: UN rights experts voiced alarm Thursday at reports of “enforced disappearances” of starving Palestinians seeking food at distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), urging Israel to end the “heinous crime.”
The seven independent experts said in a joint statement they had received reports that a number of individuals, including one child, had been “forcibly disappeared” after going to aid distribution sites in Rafah, southern Gaza.
“Reports of enforced disappearances targeting starving civilians seeking their basic right to food is not only shocking, but amounts to torture,” said the experts, who are mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, but who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations itself.
“Using food as a tool to conduct targeted and mass disappearances needs to end now.”
Israel’s military was reportedly “directly involved in the enforced disappearances of people seeking aid,” said the statement signed by the five members of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, along with Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on rights in the Palestinian territories, and her counterpart on the right to food, Michael Fakhri.
