Director of the Government Media Office in Gaza, Ismail Al-Thawabta:

▪ Campaigns to destroy food items carried out by teams from the Ministry of National Economy in the Gaza Strip come within the framework of the government duty to protect citizens’ health from consuming spoiled goods unfit for human consumption.

▪ We categorically deny the الاحتلال’s claims that there is a surplus of food or that the famine affecting the Strip no longer exists.

▪ The الاحتلال is trying to exploit scenes of some goods being destroyed to promote the idea that markets are overflowing with food supplies, which is nothing but blatant and exposed media disinformation and a futile attempt to escape legal and moral responsibility.

▪ These false claims aim to obscure the systematic starvation policy to which more than 2.4 million Palestinians are being subjected, and who lack the most basic requirements of food security.

▪ The materials being destroyed are, in essence, food shipments that were deliberately damaged as a result of the الاحتلال’s own policies.

▪ The الاحتلال’s deliberate holding of goods and aid trucks for very long periods at the crossings under direct sunlight and in unhygienic conditions.

▪ The continued prevention by the الاحتلال of the entry of fuel necessary to operate preservation refrigerators in warehouses led to these materials rotting and expiring before reaching citizens’ hands.

▪ We stress that the consumer protection teams التابعة to the Ministry of Economy are carrying out their strict monitoring role to control markets and prevent any attempts to promote these spoiled goods, which could cause a health disaster and the spread of food poisoning, further compounding the current humanitarian and medical catastrophe.

▪ The destruction of these damaged goods is further evidence of the brutality of the blockade and the worsening suffering, not the opposite, as the Palestinian citizen is deprived of access to sound food while the الاحتلال tries to distort reality and market the illusion of abundance to justify the continued closure of the crossings, the tightening of the blockade, and the restriction of the entry of relief aid.

▪ We call on the international community and UN institutions not to be drawn into the الاحتلال’s false narrative and to intervene urgently to break the blockade and fully open the crossings to allow thousands of stacked trucks of sound food and medical aid to enter in order to end the real and devastating famine that is ravaging our people in the Gaza Strip.