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"Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed
to leave. We are all starving now."
Gaza
is Dying
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Gaza.
Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of
the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the
edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a
great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the
world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.
A whole society is being destroyed.
There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily
populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It
has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they
wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown
nets.
Many people are being killed
by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A
total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom
60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa,
the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast
running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women.
This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction
of the attention given by the international media to the war
in Lebanon.
It was on June 25 that the
Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other
soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel
to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes
Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has
been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe
it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately".
Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come
and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took
over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time
they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses
were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had
been bulldozed.
Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old
farmer who owned a farm here, said: "They even destroyed
22 of my bee-hives and killed four sheep." He pointed sadly
to a field, its brown sandy earth churned up by tracks of bulldozers,
where the stumps of trees and broken branches with wilting leaves
lay in heaps. Near by a yellow car was standing on its nose in
the middle of a heap of concrete blocks that had once been a
small house.
His son Baher al-Tuba described
how for five days Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives
to one room in his house where they survived by drinking water
from a fish pond. "Snipers took up positions in the windows
and shot at anybody who came near," he said. "They
killed one of my neighbors called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56
years old and just went out to get water."
Sometimes the Israeli army
gives a warning before a house is destroyed. The sound that Palestinians
most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they
have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs
or missiles. There is no appeal.
But it is not the Israeli incursions
alone that are destroying Gaza and its people. In the understated
prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank
and Gaza face "a year of unprecedented economic recession.
Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty
to affect close to two thirds of the population." Poverty
in this case means a per capita income of under $2 a day.
There are signs of desperation
everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their
families. Israeli troops entered the Gaza industrial zone to
search for tunnels and kicked out the Palestinian police. When
the Israelis withdrew they were replaced not by the police but
by looters. On one day this week there were three donkey carts
removing twisted scrap metal from the remains of factories that
once employed thousands.
"It is the worst year
for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into
Gaza]," says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist
who is mayor of Gaza City. "Gaza is a jail. Neither people
nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving.
They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and
cucumbers they grow themselves."
The few ways that Gazans had
of making money have disappeared. Dr Abu-Ramadan says the Israelis
"have destroyed 70 per cent of our orange groves in order
to create security zones." Carnations and strawberries,
two of Gaza's main exports, were thrown away or left to rot.
An Israeli air strike destroyed the electric power station so
55 per cent of power was lost. Electricity supply is now becoming
almost as intermittent as in Baghdad.
The Israeli assault over the
past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal
of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian
government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods
entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not
transfer funds to the government.
Two thirds of people are unemployed
and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not
being paid. Gaza is now by far the poorest region on the Mediterranean.
Per capita annual income is $700, compared with $20,000 in Israel.
Conditions are much worse than in Lebanon where Hizbollah liberally
compensates war victims for loss of their houses. If Gaza did
not have enough troubles this week there were protest strikes
and marches by unpaid soldiers, police and security men. These
were organized by Fatah, the movement of the Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, which lost the election
to Hamas in January. His supporters marched through the streets
waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. "Abu Mazen you are
brave," they shouted. "Save us from this disaster."
Sour-looking Hamas gunmen kept a low profile during the demonstration
but the two sides are not far from fighting it out in the streets.
The Israeli siege and the European
boycott are a collective punishment of everybody in Gaza. The
gunmen are unlikely to be deterred. In a bed in Shifa Hospital
was a sturdy young man called Ala Hejairi with wounds to his
neck, legs, chest and stomach. "I was laying an anti-tank
mine last week in Shajhayeh when I was hit by fire from an Israeli
drone," he said. "I will return to the resistance when
I am better. Why should I worry? If I die I will die a martyr
and go to paradise."
His father, Adel, said he was
proud of what his son had done adding that three of his nephews
were already martyrs. He supported the Hamas government: "Arab
and Western countries want to destroy this government because
it is the government of the resistance."
As the economy collapses there
will be many more young men in Gaza willing to take Ala Hejairi's
place. Untrained and ill-armed most will be killed. But the destruction
of Gaza, now under way, will ensure that no peace is possible
in the Middle East for generations to come.
CounterPunch
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CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
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