Gaza's Humanitarian Crisis

This past Monday, the Israeli military intercepted a humanitarian aid convoy in international waters that was headed to the Gaza Strip with the intention of breaking the Israeli blockade to deliver much-needed supplies to the civilian population. After news broke that the interception turned violent and nine people died as protesters and Israeli troops clashed, gigantic protests erupted worldwide and the Israeli raid was met with international condemnation. While the incident of the Freedom Flotilla was tragic enough, it helps highlight an even greater tragedy: the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip resulting from the Israeli and Egyptian-imposed embargo. Despite the fact that the blockade of the Gaza Strip has been in place for nearly three years -- virtually devastating its civil society with "collective punishment" -- Israeli officials and leading American conservatives have repeatedly denied that a humanitarian crisis is taking place. But the truth is that the embargo is inflicting tremendous suffering on Gaza's civilian population while strengthening the hands of the extremists its meant to target.




A BRUTAL BLOCKADE: At the urging of the United States, Palestinians went to the polls in 2006 to vote for new leadership. Disaffected by the ruling Fatah party's corruption, many Palestinians saw Hamas and its extensive social support network as a viable alternative, and Hamas swept the elections. Following a civil war was that encouraged and supported by the Bush administration, Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Israel and Egypt reacted by imposing a "stifling" blockade of the territory. While Israel claims that its embargo is intended to keep weapons shipments out of the hands of Hamas, the flow of all sorts of basic goods, including food and medicine, have been severely restricted from the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in Gaza. Many goods now come through the tunnels at the Egyptian border. The Israeli government acknowledges that it keeps a list of items that are and aren't allowed into Gaza. For example, Israel prohibits the import of chocolate (deemed a "luxury good"), fabrics, notebooks, and some toys, but allows the importation of plastic buckets or combs. Perhaps even more disturbingly, the Israeli human rights group Gisha discovered that the government maintains a document that "apparently determines the minimum nutritional needs of Gaza's population, according to caloric intake and grams of food, parsed by age and gender," suggesting that the Israelis may be intentionally tightly controlling the Gazan population's diet. (In 2006, an adviser to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that the idea behind an embargo would be to "put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.") The effect of the embargo has been devastating on the civilian population, 44 percent of which is under the age of 15. A year into the embargo, a coalition of human rights organizations released a "scathing"report that found that, as a result of the blockade, "hospitals are suffering from power cuts of up to 12 hours a day, and sewage systems were closed to collapse, with 40-50 million liters of sewage pouring into the sea daily." The U.N. agency in charge of aiding Palestinians finds that the number of Gazans who are unable to "buy basic items such as soap, stationary, and safe drinking water has tripled since 2007." According to U.N. statistics, "about 70% of Gazans live on less than $1 a day, 75% rely on food aid, and 60% have no daily access to water." The humanitarian agency Oxfam found that most houses in Gaza were going "without power for 35-60 hours a week." The blockade has strengthened Hamas by bolstering the tunnel economy, through which various contraband items are smuggled into Gaza and decimating the legitimate business community. Speaking from Gaza in April, Bassam Nasser of Catholic Relief Services said "the blockade enabled Hamas to become in complete control of everything in Gaza," and that "closing Gaza and enabling goods or commodities to enter mostly only through the tunnels [has] enabled Hamas to have greater control."