Gaza headed in only one direction

Roger Cohen, a regular columnist on The New York Times, is Jewish and has certainly shown his pro-Israel proclivities in past columns. It is therefore more than refreshing to read his latest column for the Times in which he makes a grim prognosis for Israel - in a word, war! - if it doesn't do something, and soon, to redress the very real issues in Gaza.

"There is another war waiting to happen in Gaza. The last one changed nothing. Hamas rockets are being test-fired. A Palestinian farmer has been shot dead near the border. Tensions simmer. The draft Security Council resolution at the United Nations, championed by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, seeking a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank by 2017, amounts to an elaborate sideshow. The real matter of diplomatic urgency going into 2015, for the Palestinian people and the world, is to end the lockdown of Gaza.

“People are mad, frustrated, they have nothing to lose,” Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to the Hamas Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, told me. “We are dying gradually so it is better to die with dignity.”

Read Cohen's full column here.

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