Illustration by Omar Khouri on Palestine and the Right to Food (2024)
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, presented his report to the UN General Assembly a year ago on 18 October 2024. The report’s focus was Starvation and the right to food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty. The report includes a devastating account of the Israeli state’s starvation of the Palestinian population in Gaza during that year. The report begins as follows:
On 9 October 2023, Israel announced its starvation campaign against Gaza. By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 per cent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger. 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.
10 months later in August 2025, the UN finally confirmed famine conditions in Gaza. UN Secretary-General António Guterres commented, saying:
“It is a man-made disaster, a moral indictment – and a failure of humanity itself. Famine is not about food; it is the deliberate collapse of the systems needed for human survival.”
As the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food presented his report last year he included illustrated graphic reports by artist Omar Khouri.
We share the first of these reports as part of World Food Day, which illustrates the Israeli attacks against Palestinian food sovereignty in Gaza through the story of the Gaza fishers.
This illustrated report is based on first-hand testimony by Zakaria Fadel Hasan Baker, an activist and specialist in Gaza’s fishing industry.
Note: On page 17 of his report, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri summarises Zakaria Fadel Hasan’s story:
“The graphic report summarizes and illustrates the first-hand testimony of Zakaria Fadel Hasan Baker, an activist and specialist in Gaza’s fishing sector: like in any coastal community, life in Gaza is defined by the sea. Small-scale fishers are the heart of that life.
Before October 2023, Gaza’s fishing community was made up of 4,500 regular workers, approximately 1,500 seasonal workers, 1,050 motorboats and 900 rowboats. They had five marinas at which to dock their fishing boats: North Gaza, Gaza City, Deir el Balah, Khan Younes and Rafah.
Since 7 October, Israel has denied all fishers access to the sea and destroyed over 75 per cent of the fishing sector. All this destruction is yet another way that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians since 1991.
Under the Oslo Accords, Palestinians were supposed to be able to fish within 20 nautical miles from the shore. Israel, through the blockade, limited fishers to about 6 nautical miles from the shore, where fishing was not easy due to shallow waters with sandy and rocky sea floors. They were also regularly shot at and arrested by Israeli forces simply for fishing in Palestinian territorial waters.
The life of fishers tells you a lot about a place. In Gaza, it is telling us that the starvation of the Palestinian people is not a sudden and unpredictable consequence of the latest aggressions by the occupation forces but a gradual and deliberate strategy that was set in motion many years ago. “
This World Food Day series is brought to you by Concern Worldwide, Scoilnet, Self Help Africa and developmenteducation.ie
