United Nations, Pakistan has expressed deep concern at the fact that starvation and collective punishment have often been used as tools to advance military or political objectives, in stark violation of international humanitarian law and UN Security Council resolution 2417.
Making a national statement at the Security Council’s Open Debate on Conflict-Related Food Insecurity, Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the UN, condemned the accelerating trend of hunger being deployed as an instrument of coercion, particularly noting that Gaza epitomized the cruelty of this weaponization, as “100 percent of the population faces high levels of acute food insecurity,” with entire communities now trapped in a catastrophic spiral of deprivation, “marked by starvation, destitution, and death.”
As conflicts and economic desperation converge into an unprecedented humanitarian emergency, Pakistan called on the UN Security Council to uphold the inviolability of humanitarian law, signaling that the world is witnessing a “dangerous two-way dynamic” in which violence drives hunger in open defiance of international humanitarian law and Security Council resolution 2417.
Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad delivered a stark appeal for unified, urgently scaled international action to confront a crisis where starvation is wielded as strategy and suffering as leverage – to safeguard the fundamental right to food for all and prevent hunger from becoming the most brutal currency of modern conflict.
Welcoming Sierra Leone’s initiative, he acknowledged President Dr. Julius Maada Bio and briefers whose analyses exposed with disquieting clarity the contours of the “hunger-conflict nexus.” He referenced the 2025 Global Report on Food Crises, which places over 294 million people in 53 countries in the grip of acute food insecurity – driven chiefly by conflict.
Ambassador Asim said that while recent diplomatic efforts present a tentative promise, reversing “the devastation of the past two years” hinges on strict compliance with the ceasefire, guaranteed humanitarian access, and mobilization for recovery. Comparable crises endure in Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, the DRC, Haiti, and other protracted conflicts – where collapsed livelihoods now subsist solely on humanitarian aid.
The Ambassador urged an integrated and rules-based framework anchored in four imperatives: strict adherence to the UN Charter, unconditional protection of humanitarian access and accountability for its obstruction, systemic reforms to confront the structural drivers of hunger – from poverty to agricultural inequalities and climate vulnerabilities – and a whole-of-system approach linking prevention, conflict resolution, early warning, peacebuilding, and responsible stewardship of natural resources.
He said that unless the Security Council reasserts its primacy in safeguarding civilian access to food, it risks ceding ground to a dangerous permissiveness in which engineered deprivation becomes an accepted instrument of war – solemn commitments must transform into enforceable protections molded by coherence, urgency, and moral authority.
