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Bibi's lies, yet again v the truth

On CNN the Israeli PM claims that all restrictions on the inflow of goods, etc., into Gaza have been limited. It's a blatant lie.

Over to FP where in a piece "Gaza after the revolution" Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, details the real facts.

"In a recent report on food and water insecurity in the Gaza Strip, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) revealed some striking statistics regarding the damage incurred. For example, levels of food insecurity--defined by the World Food Programme as a "lack of access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food, which meets dietary needs...for an active and healthy life"--rose from 40 percent in 2003 to 61 percent towards the end of 2010. This means that over 900,000 people out of a total population of 1.5 million "do not have the self-sufficient means to grow or purchase the bare minimum amount of food for themselves and their families" (while another 200,000-plus remain vulnerable to food insecurity).

Currently, at least 75 percent of Gazan families are dependent for their basic needs on some form of humanitarian assistance -- dubbed the "humanitarian minimum"-- provided by international donors, all of whom (including several Arab states) are complicit in Gaza's devastation. PHRI further argues that according to an Israeli army document, 'Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip-Red Lines', "Israel's obligation to Palestinians in Gaza only extends to ensuring bare necessities required for survival. According to this principle, personal and economic development above this [humanitarian] minimum should be actively prevented." And it has. The diminished level of personal wellbeing is revealed by the fact that without high levels of international humanitarian aid Gaza would undoubtedly suffer a widespread nutritional crisis.

Economic development was precluded long ago but Gaza's current reality is crushingly adverse, characterized by the virtual collapse of an economy that was once considered lower middle income (together with the West Bank) and an unemployment rate that reached 45 percent in 2011, among the highest in the world.

According to the UN, in August 2000 10,614 truckloads of food and materials entered Gaza. By January 2011 this plummeted to 4,123 truckloads (as desperately needed construction materials remain banned) and exports fell from 2,460 to 107 truckloads."

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