Israeli Officials Call for Starving Millions of Iranians

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s best and brightest have an idea on how to deal with Iran’s imaginary nukes – starve the Iranian people to death.  “North Korea is halting its nuclear program in order to receive aid in food, and this is what should be done with Iran as well,” an unnamed official told Ynetnews. “Suffocating sanctions could lead to a grave economic situation in Iran and to a shortage of food,” the source explained. “This would force the regime to consider whether the nuclear adventure is worthwhile, while the Persian people have nothing to eat and may rise up as was the case in Syria, Tunisia and other Arab states.”


“The Western world led by the United States must implement stifling sanctions at this time already, rather than wait or hesitate,” the official continued. “In order to suffocate Iran economically and diplomatically and lead the regime there to a hopeless situation, this must be done now, without delay.”
Starving a civilian population is prohibited under Article 54 of the Geneva Convention. The Israeli government honed this brutal practice in the Gaza Strip. “Documents, whose existence were denied by the Israeli government for over a year, have been released after a legal battle led by Israeli human rights group, Gisha,” the International Middle East Media Center reported in November of 2010.

The documents reveal a deliberate policy by the Israeli government in which the dietary needs for the population of Gaza are chillingly calculated, and the amounts of food let in by the Israeli government measured to remain just enough to keep the population alive at a near-starvation level. This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are “putting the people of Gaza on a diet”….
The documents are even more disturbing, say human rights activists, when one considers the fact that close to half of the people of Gaza are children under the age of eighteen. This means that Israel has deliberately forced the undernourishment of hundreds of thousands of children in direct violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jason Ditz notes that blockading Iran will not produce starvation. “Iran is actually a net food exporter, and while more sanctions could make the industry less efficient and perhaps curb exports, it would not make the food Iran does grow disappear into thin air.”
“The idea that a suddenly starving populace is going to up and overthrow its government on behalf of those that are starving them, however, seems to fly in the face of the history of sanctions,” Ditz writes.
The Israelis, of course, are not alone – the United States, Europe and the United Nations used starvation in Iraq. They imposed a medieval embargo over the period of a decade and tried to starve the nation into submission. The result was over 500,000 dead children, which Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright said was a price worth paying. Over the span of ten years, child mortality in Iraq went from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest.