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Spiralling towards a human disaster

When will the world wake up to the intolerable and inhumane treatment the Israelis are inflicting on the people of Gaza.

Sara Roy teaches at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Writing in the London Review of Books she details the extent of the blockade of Gaza by Israel and the devastating effect on the Gazans:

"The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.

How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next."

Over at The Guardian:

"Israel's blockade of Gaza is pushing the territory to the brink of collapse and fuelling the growth of a black money market controlled by Hamas, the World Bank warned yesterday."

And a blunt warning in a Comment is Free piece in The Guardian Seth Freedman writes under the headline "Remove the blinkers and see the truth" about what the Israelis are "doing" to the Palestinians:

"Although I am a relative newcomer to Israel's Mediterranean shores, the amount of exposure I have had during my four-year sojourn in the Holy Land to the daily humiliation and oppression being meted out to the Palestinians is more than most armchair critics will see in a lifetime. I should know – I was one of them myself for my first 24 years on the planet, and am all too aware how easy it is to be duped by second- or third-hand reporting from the front lines, whether through the media or via friends and family giving their skewed take from inside Israel's borders."

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