Palestine Times
The silent but real slow-motion genocide against the Gaza Strip’s estimated 1.5 million inhabitants is being stepped up as the Israeli occupation army continues to blockade the east Mediterranean coastal territory for the sixteenth successive month.
Moreover, apart from some symbolic consumer products such as flour, which Israel allows into the Gaza Strip, the Israeli government has decided to effectively stop allowing the entry of more than 200 important commodities into Gaza, including many varieties of medicine, essential food products and raw materials.
The throttling blockade, coupled with the closure of the Egyptian-Palestinian borders, has already created a real human tragedy affecting the daily life of most Gazans and exacerbating an already sorry state of poverty and deprivation.
According to observers and medical sources in Gaza, Gazans with chronic diseases are dying as a result of the dearth of medicine and especially because Israel won’t allow them to seek medical care in Israel, the West Bank, or Egypt.
Last month, a suffering Gazan man died at the Eretz checkpoint after Israeli soldiers denied him entry into Israel for medical treatment.
Similarly, cancer patients are also forced to succumb to their illnesses for the same reasons, as callous politicians vie to prove to an equally callous Jewish public their toughness and mercilessness toward the Palestinians.
Some Gazans are already comparing their situation with Ghetto Warsaw of Poland in 1943 when numerous Jews perished as a result of a harsh Nazi blockade.
This writer has been talking with ordinary Gazans who have communicated to the world the harsh conditions facing a civilian community thoroughly tormented by Israeli military repression and economic blockade.
“The Jews are starving us. They are playing God with us. They are giving themselves the right to decide if we shall live or die,” said Ra’ed Balousha, an unemployed construction worker whose family depends to a large extent on monthly stipends received from UNRWA—the United Nations Relief and Work Agency.
Balousha, who lives in central Gaza, revealed that Gazans were being barred from accessing food and work and many of them were being forced to “concentrate their efforts on securing the basics,” such as flour and bread.
“Only the rich, and they are very few, are paying attention to secondary commodities. Ordinary people have only one thought in their heads: how to secure a loaf of bread for their children.”
Balousha went on to explain that the task of meeting the “basics” was getting harder and harder for two main reasons:
“First of all, people don’t have money. How would you imagine yourself if you haven’t earned a penny for 15 months? Israel is off-limits to us; we have no access to the West Bank; the Rafah crossing is closed; and if we go fishing, the Israeli gunboats will open fire on us and kill us. You see they want us to die very quietly, very silently. I don’t know why the world is doing nothing and saying nothing while everyone is talking about a peace conference in America.”
Balousha is not being too dramatic in communicating the tragic conditions in Gaza.
Layla Nuno is a social worker in Gaza and she says that “definite signs of malnutrition were beginning to appear” in many places in the Gaza Strip.
“Children in schools come with yellowish faces, piercing eyes, and clear signs of frailty. There is lack of concentration in school and some children are even losing weight,” Nuno said in a telephone interview recently.
“I don’t know when the international community will move to face this tragedy before it turns into a disaster like that in Ethiopia more than two decades ago.
Turning her wrath on the Israeli apartheid regime, which it says is the sole and ultimate criminal, Nuno explained that the “unfolding tragedy in Gaza is not the result of a drought or an act of God, but the result of a sadistic, genocidal Israeli campaign aimed at starving and killing Gazans.”
In mid-October, Israel declared the Gaza Strip a “hostile entity.” However, the Israeli declaration was being dismissed by most Palestinians as “a ruse meant to mislead the world public opinion.”
“Israel is the occupying power in the Gaza Strip. Israel controls the Gaza Strip, including its borders, border crossings, seashore, its access to food and water and fuel and all basic vital needs. Hence, declaring Gaza a hostile entity is meaningless and may be used as a pretext to commit genocide,” said Saleh Na’ami, a Gaza journalist and correspondent of the London-based Arabic language daily newspaper, al-Sharq al-Awsat.
Al-Na’ami reminds us that according to international law, Israel is responsible for meeting the needs of the 1.5 million Gazans by virtue of being the occupying power.
“How could an occupying power declare a people under its own occupation a hostile entity unless that occupying power is contemplating malicious designs against these people? It is like Nazi Germany declaring Ghetto Warsaw a hostile entity.”
In addition to the brazen policy of starving Palestinians to death or near death, the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared end-October that Israel will start cutting off electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza.
Moreover, the Israeli occupation army has been carrying out daily acts of murder and killings throughout the Gaza Strip.
Israeli tanks and artillery, backed by Israeli helicopter gun-ships and armed drones, have carried out brutal operations against Palestinian population centres, killing innocent people and causing widespread destruction to the civilian infrastructure, as well as to farms and agricultural fields.
During the month of October alone, as many as 46 Palestinians were killed, including a number of children.
Normally, the Israeli occupation army claims that Palestinian children and civilians are killed mistakenly. However, the shocking frequency of the civilian deaths proves that Israeli troops murder Palestinian civilians knowingly and deliberately.
According to Israeli and Palestinian sources, more than 800 Palestinian children and minors were killed by the Israeli occupation army and paramilitary Jewish terrorists since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada seven years ago.
The Israeli government claims that the unmitigated acts of killings in Gaza, along with the policy of starving civilians, which began during the Ariel Sharon government in 2004, were a response to the firing of homemade projectiles onto Jewish settlements outside Gaza.
However, Palestinians dismiss Israeli claims as “cheap disinformation.”
“The Palestinian authorities proposed a ceasefire with Israel on numerous occasions. Last month (September), Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh issued a new call for a ceasefire, but Israel always said ‘No,’ because it wants the Palestinians to die and surrender,” said the Gaza government spokesperson Ghazi Hamad.
Hamad said the firing of the projectiles onto Israeli settlement was a desperate effort on the part of Palestinian resistance fighters to deter Israel from killing the Palestinians.
“What Israel seems to be telling us is that ‘I will continue to kill you and destroy your homes and decimate your farms and attack you and hound you regardless of what you do or what you don’t do. Hence, it is clear that the ball is in Israel’s court.”
In addition to killing the Palestinians and starving them, the Israeli government has been pressuring the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States to pressure Egypt to hermetically seal its borders with Gaza, ostensibly to make sure that not a single loaf of bread gets into Gaza.
The callous and manifestly criminal Israeli policy has prompted many Palestinian figures at home and in the Diaspora to issue an SOS to the Arab and Muslim masses, as well as to friends of the Palestinians around the world, to take to the streets and organize protests to stop the Israeli genocide before it is too late.
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© 2007 Palestine Times
SOURCE: http://www.ptimes.org/main/default.aspx?xyz=BOgLkxlDHteZpYqykRlUuI1kx%2fVDUOForR0boGvT5LUAyppihg2
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