Issues

Palestine

Daily update on Gaza: the crisis continues after the bombs stop

Posted on Monday January 26, 2009

Gaza in crisis

In the UK, Channel 4’s Jonathan Miller traveled the length of Gaza to report on the conditions there. What he saw was devastation. Simply surviving is still priority number one for Gazans. While press attention has focused on the network of tunnels that allowed Hamas to smuggle rockets into Gaza, the reality is that they were also essential to bringing in foodstuffs, medicine and fuel during siege of the last 18 months, which has still not been lifted. Miller reports, “It’s not just guns and rockets that come through here. These tunnels are a lifeline for Gaza’s 1.5 million people.” Humanitarian aid organizations aren’t able to get enough trucks into Gaza every day. The Palestinians in Gaza are still facing a series of crises: for food, water, and fuel…

Gaza can’t wait

Deutsche Welle: “John Holmes, the UN’s Humanitarian Affairs chief, said Israel was allowing in more food and medicine into Gaza than it did before it launched the military offensive against Hamas militants last December. Holmes added that Israel was allowing the daily transfer of 120 truckloads of food and medical supplies into Gaza.”

In the article, “UN seeks massive aid for Gaza, US wants border open” by Agence France Presse, Holmes comments on the state of humanitarian aid in Gaza: “The UN recognised that with some 120 trucks being allowed into Gaza daily, the flow of humanitarian goods had improved. ‘But that’s far from enough,’ [Holmes] said. The basic requirements of Gaza for humanitarian and commercial goods, before the Hamas takeover (June 2007), was 500 to 600 hundreds trucks a day.”

The Times Online from the U.K. is reporting yet another, inevitable crisis facing Gaza – crop failure. “International aid groups say that while Israel’s continuing restrictions on the flow of goods and relief workers into the devastated enclave is hampering emergency efforts, the destruction of Gaza’s agriculture means that harvests are likely to fail and the Strip will depend more on handouts.” With restrictions on capital flow still choking Gaza, where will the Palestinians find the resources they need to rebuild their lives?

ACTION ITEM: Write to the President and ask him to send aid to Gaza immediately. Our USNS hospital ships have run humanitarian missions before, missions that provided medical attention to civilians while helping to rebuild critical infrastructure, including clinics and schools… Click here now.

The basic necessities: Food, clothing… shelter

Even if adequate water and food can be found for the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza, the hope of restoring their homes remains slim:

Aid agencies expect several hundred million dollars to be pledged at a conference next week for items like food, medicine and spare parts for electrical grids. But that does not touch the broader question of rebuilding, which will require large quantities of cement, metal and glass, all of which Gaza lacks.

The task is enormous: An estimated 4,000 homes were destroyed and 17,000 damaged in the three-week war that began Dec. 27, Palestinian authorities said.

Israel said that letting such supplies in freely would be risky. Hamas militants have built rockets from pipes imported for a sanitation plant last year, Israeli officials said, and while Israel is attending to humanitarian aid – the number of trucks with food and other urgent supplies that now pass through Israeli crossings into Gaza has tripled – the Israeli authorities have yet to decide what else they will permit into Gaza.

Read the whole article in the New York Times here.

What of the children?

There is a haunting photograph circulating the Net today, of Palestinian students in Gaza returning to school this week. Beside each of the children sitting in school stands a card with the name of a child from that school who was killed during the 22 day ‘war in Gaza’. Over 400 children were numbered among the dead. What then, is left for those who are living? The Washington Post touches on the effect this conflict has had on the children of Gaza:

Even the children who escaped physical injury face the psychological consequences of having lived under near-constant bombardment for 22 days and nights. A week into a fragile cease-fire, mental health experts, human rights advocates and parents say they worry that this generation of Palestinian children will suffer the effects of the war for decades to come.

“We in Gaza are 1.5 million people in need of immediate psychotherapy,” said Issam Younis, director general of the al-Mezan Center for Human Rights. “But the children especially. They have experienced severe trauma. They should cry. They should shout. But the way they are talking about this tragedy, it’s not normal.” ...

Hassan Shaban Zeyada, a psychologist with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, said the war is likely to make Palestinian children more inclined toward violence.

“If your parents can’t give you safety, kids will look to others who can,” he said. “They’re going to want to play the role of the fighter. So the Israeli government is really creating its own enemy.”

If you watched Miller’s video to the end, he also comments on a chilling future for the children of Gaza, where half the population is under the age of 16. Israel, in its quest for security, has most likely created a security nightmare, as three-quarters of a million children grow up behind the wall with the memory of Operation Cast Lead as the defining moment of their lives.

Final words from… Uri Averny

If the peace process is to move forward, it will depend upon the good will of people on both sides, and their ability to acknowledge the legitimacy of each side’s concerns. And so today we leave you with some thoughts from ”>Uri Averny...

Obama’s Message: The wrong side of history…

Between Israel and the United States a gap has opened this week, a narrow gap, almost invisible – but it may widen into an abyss.

The first signs are small. In his inaugural speech, Obama proclaimed that “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and nonbelievers.” Since when? Since when do the Muslims precede the Jews? What has happened to the “Judeo-Christian Heritage”? (A completely false term to start with, since Judaism is much closer to Islam than to Christianity. For example: neither Judaism nor Islam supports the separation of religion and state.)

The very next morning, Obama phoned a number of Middle East leaders. He decided to make a quite unique gesture: placing the first call to Mahmoud Abbas, and only the next to Olmert. The Israeli media could not stomach that. Haaretz, for example, consciously falsified the record by writing – not once but twice in the same issue – that Obama had called “Olmert, Abbas, Mubarak and King Abdallah” (in that order).

Instead of the group of American Jews who had been in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama, on his very first day in office, appointed an Arab-American, George Mitchell, whose mother had come to America from Lebanon at age 18, and who himself, orphaned from his Irish father, was brought up in a Maronite Christian Lebanese family.

These are not good tidings for the Israeli leaders. For the last 42 years, they have pursued a policy of expansion, occupation and settlements in close cooperation with Washington. They have relied on unlimited American support, from the massive supply of money and arms to the use of the veto in the Security Council. This support was essential to their policy. This support may now be reaching its limits.

It will happen, of course, gradually. The pro-Israel lobby in Washington will continue to put the fear of God into Congress. A huge ship like the United States can change course only very slowly, in a gentle curve. But the turn-around started already on the first day of the Obama administration.

This could not have happened, if America itself had not changed. That is not a political change alone. It is a change in the world-view, in mental outlook, in values.