The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Food, Michael Fakhri, on Gaza

5 September, 2025 • Lina Mounzer

Palestinian civilians wait in line for hours for the distribution that could only serve a small number of people, in Nuseirat Refugee Camp, central Gaza on September 1, 2025 (photo Moiz Salhi/Anadolu/Getty images).

UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri joins TMR Senior Editor Lina Mounzer to discuss, among other things, whether international humanitarian law still has any meaning, if the UN has outlived its usefulness, why the General Assembly has still not voted Israel out, how starvation is always a political decision and what, if anything, we can do about all of this.

Lina Mounzer

 

Michael Fakhri is a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law where he teaches courses on human rights, food law, development, and commercial law. He is also the director of the Food Resiliency Project in the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center. He holds a Doctorate from the University of Toronto, Masters from Harvard Law School, Bachelor of Laws from Queen’s University, and a Bachelor of Science in Ecology from Western University. During his practice as a lawyer, Michael Fakhri fought for the rights of people who were indigent and incarcerated in a psychiatric institution. More recently, his book Bandung, Global History, and International Law (co-edited with Vasuki Nesiah and Luis Eslava) was cited by the International Court of Justice. He was appointed Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food by the Human Rights Council in March 2020 and assumed his functions on the 1st of May, 2020.

Lina Mounzer

Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. She has been a contributor to many prominent publications including the Paris Review, Freeman’s, Washington Post, and The Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Tales of Two Planets (Penguin 2020), and Best American Essays 2022 (Harper Collins 2022). She is Senior Editor at The Markaz Review.

faminefood as a weaponhumanitarian reliefIsrael's war on GazastarvationUnited Nations

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