WASHINGTON: Most Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank are eating only one meal a day, leading to malnutrition at levels found in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new United Nations report.

The area is “on the verge of humanitarian catastrophe”, adds the document released on Wednesday by the UN Human Rights Commission’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler.

The report, based on a visit to the territories in July, as well as statistics accumulated over the past year by UN and US agencies, describes the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as a “horrifying tragedy”, and stresses that Israel has the right to take defensive measures to protect its citizens against attacks.

But Ziegler, a recognised authority on international law and human rights from Switzerland, charges Israel with failing to uphold its legal obligation to ensure the right to food of the civilian Palestinian population.

The result — more than one-half of Palestinian households are currently eating only one meal a day and are fully dependent on international food aid.

“Many Palestinians who the special rapporteur met spoke of trying to subsist on little more than bread and tea,” Ziegler wrote in his 24-page report.

“Severe malnutrition reported in Gaza is now equivalent to levels found in poor, sub-Saharan countries, an absurd situation as Palestine was formerly a middle-income economy” with a rich agricultural base.

“The consequences of the ways in which current security measures are applied in the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories) are entirely disproportionate in the sense that they jeopardize the food and water security of the great majority of the Palestinians and thus amount to collective punishment,” it added.

Ziegler called on Israel to “immediately lift internal closures within the OPT” that restrict movement and access to food, and to end “the regime of closures and curfews where these are causing an increase in the malnutrition and poverty levels of the civilian Palestinian population”.

The report was released just one day after another UN study by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned that Israel’s construction of a barrier separating Palestinian from Israeli populations around and within the West Bank will cause major additional hardships for Palestinian civilians, separating some 680,000 of them from their fields, jobs and schools.

When completed, the 640-km-long fence will also effectively expropriate or render useless some 14.5 per cent of the West Bank, it added.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.