The head of European diplomacy, Giuseppe Borrell, denounced the use of hunger as a “weapon of war” in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday during his deployment to the UN Security Council.

“This humanitarian crisis is not a natural disaster, it’s not a flood, it’s not an earthquake — it’s man-made,” he said, pressing for more humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Palestinian enclave, where Israeli military operations have claimed lives as this stage in at least 31,184 people, the majority of them women and children, according to the Hamas Health Ministry.

“When considering alternative routes to help, by sea or from the airwaves, we must remember that we need to do so because land routes are usually closed. Artificially closed,” he insisted, never mentioning Israel by name.

“And depriving the population of food is being used as a weapon of war.”

“Since we condemn this in Ukraine, we must use the same words for what is happening in Gaza,” he added.

Humanitarian aid, which is subject to Israeli control and approval, reaches the Gaza Strip at a trickle, a small Palestinian enclave of 2.4 million people where the United Nations warns of a growing risk of widespread famine, which it now considers ” almost inevitable.”

The situation is extremely serious in the northern part of the enclave, where the distribution of aid to some 300,000 people is practically impossible due to fighting, destruction and looting.

The war in the Gaza Strip erupted after Hamas’s military arm launched an unprecedented attack on southern Israel targeting the Gaza Strip on October 7, killing 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on in official Israeli data.