Palestinian foreign minister says Israel is deliberately starving people in Gaza

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told a United Nations event that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war against people in Gaza.

The event was to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Maliki denounced the "international failure" to respect Palestinian rights at a UN meeting in Geneva.

"As we speak, at least one million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them children, are starving, not because of a natural disaster or because of lack of generous assistance waiting at the border," he said. 

"No, they are starving because of Israel's deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war against the people it occupied," he added.

"Rather than insisting on respecting the Palestinian people's basic right to eat and drink water, we are living through this dystopian reality that excludes Palestinians from the most basic rights afforded to all human beings," he said, describing it as an "utter international failure" to protect Palestinians.