In a report this week, UN rapporteur Fakhri said the deliberate starvation began in October when Israel launched its assault on Gaza, cutting off all food, water, fuel, and other essential supplies to the territory.

“By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 percent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger,” Fakhri said. “Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.”

A professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Fakhri was appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council as the investigator, or special rapporteur, on the right to food and assumed the role in 2020.

He said it goes back 76 years to Israel's independence and its continuous dislocation of Palestinians. Since then, he said Israel has been deploying “the full range of techniques of hunger and starvation against the Palestinians, perfecting the degree of control, suffering and death that it can cause through food systems.”

Fakhri documented his findings in a report to the UN General Assembly circulated Thursday.

Since the war in Gaza began, Fakhri said he has received direct reports of the destruction of the territory's food system, including farmland and fishing, which also has been documented and recognized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and others.

“Israel then used humanitarian aid as a political and military weapon to harm and kill the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he added.

Under intense international pressure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has gradually opened some border crossings for tightly controlled deliveries. Fakhri said limited aid initially went mostly to southern and central Gaza, not to the north where Israel had forced Palestinians to leave.

Israel allows trucks of aid through two small crossings in the north and one main crossing in the south, Karm Abu Salem. However, since Israel’s invasion of the southern city of Rafah in May, the UN and other aid agencies say they struggle to reach the Gaza side of Karm Abu Salem to retrieve the aid for free distribution because Israel’s army assault makes it too dangerous.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the humanitarian situation in Gaza “beyond catastrophic,” with more than 1 million Palestinians not receiving any food rations in August and a 35 percent drop in people getting daily cooked meals.

The UN humanitarian office attributed the sharp reduction in cooked meals partly to multiple evacuation orders from Israeli occupation forces that forced at least 70 of 130 kitchens to either suspend or relocate their operations, he said Thursday.

The UN’s humanitarian partners also lacked sufficient food supplies to meet requirements for the second straight month in central and southern Gaza, Dujarric added.

He said critical shortages of supplies in Gaza are stem from hostilities, insecurity, damaged roads, and Israeli obstacles and access limitations.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.