[Peace-discuss] Israeli collective punishment, which we allow

[C. G. Estabrook]

	London Review of Books
	1 January 2009
	If Gaza falls . . .
	Sara Roy

Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack 
inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between 
Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the 
agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by 
firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s 
siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there 
are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political 
identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza 
onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between 
Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial 
sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished 
and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady 
employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.

On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza. 
Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertiliser, 
plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer 
getting through in sufficient quantities or at all. According to Oxfam only 137 
trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 
4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October 
this year and 564 in December 2005. The two main food providers in Gaza are the 
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and 
the World Food Programme (WFP). UNRWA alone feeds approximately 750,000 people 
in Gaza, and requires 15 trucks of food daily to do so. Between 5 November and 
30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; 
during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was 
required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the 
result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their 
scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of 
the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA 
suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes 
because of the blockade.

The WFP has had similar problems, sending only 35 trucks out of the 190 it had 
scheduled to cover Gazans’ needs until the start of February (six more were 
allowed in between 30 November and 6 December). Not only that: the WFP has to 
pay to store food that isn’t being sent to Gaza. This cost $215,000 in November 
alone. If the siege continues, the WFP will have to pay an extra $150,000 for 
storage in December, money that will be used not to support Palestinians but to 
benefit Israeli business.

The majority of commercial bakeries in Gaza – 30 out of 47 – have had to close 
because they have run out of cooking gas. People are using any fuel they can 
find to cook with. As the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has made 
clear, cooking-gas canisters are necessary for generating the warmth to incubate 
broiler chicks. Shortages of gas and animal feed have forced commercial 
producers to smother hundreds of thousands of chicks. By April, according to the 
FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on 
chicken as a major source of protein.

Banks, suffering from Israeli restrictions on the transfer of banknotes into the 
territory were forced to close on 4 December. A sign on the door of one read: 
‘Due to the decision of the Palestinian Finance Authority, the bank will be 
closed today Thursday, 4.12.2008, because of the unavailability of cash money, 
and the bank will be reopened once the cash money is available.’

The World Bank has warned that Gaza’s banking system could collapse if these 
restrictions continue. All cash for work programmes has been stopped and on 19 
November UNRWA suspended its cash assistance programme to the most needy. It 
also ceased production of textbooks because there is no paper, ink or glue in 
Gaza. This will affect 200,000 students returning to school in the new year. On 
11 December, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, sent $25 million 
following an appeal from the Palestinian prime minister, Salaam Fayad, the first 
infusion of its kind since October. It won’t even cover a month’s salary for 
Gaza’s 77,000 civil servants.

On 13 November production at Gaza’s only power station was suspended and the 
turbines shut down because it had run out of industrial diesel. This in turn 
caused the two turbine batteries to run down, and they failed to start up again 
when fuel was received some ten days later. About a hundred spare parts ordered 
for the turbines have been sitting in the port of Ashdod in Israel for the last 
eight months, waiting for the Israeli authorities to let them through customs. 
Now Israel has started to auction these parts because they have been in customs 
for more than 45 days. The proceeds are being held in Israeli accounts.

During the week of 30 November, 394,000 litres of industrial diesel were allowed 
in for the power plant: approximately 18 per cent of the weekly minimum that 
Israel is legally obliged to allow in. It was enough for one turbine to run for 
two days before the plant was shut down again. The Gaza Electricity Distribution 
Company said that most of the Gaza Strip will be without electricity for between 
four and 12 hours a day. At any given time during these outages, over 65,000 
people have no electricity.

No other diesel fuel (for standby generators and transport) was delivered during 
that week, no petrol (which has been kept out since early November) or cooking 
gas. Gaza’s hospitals are apparently relying on diesel and gas smuggled from 
Egypt via the tunnels; these supplies are said to be administered and taxed by 
Hamas. Even so, two of Gaza’s hospitals have been out of cooking gas since the 
week of 23 November.

Adding to the problems caused by the siege are those created by the political 
divisions between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas 
Authority in Gaza. For example, Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility 
(CMWU), which is not controlled by Hamas, is supposed to receive funds from the 
World Bank via the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) in Ramallah to pay for fuel 
to run the pumps for Gaza’s sewage system. Since June, the PWA has refused to 
hand over those funds, perhaps because it feels that a functioning sewage system 
would benefit Hamas. I don’t know whether the World Bank has attempted to 
intervene, but meanwhile UNRWA is providing the fuel, although they have no 
budget for it. The CMWU has also asked Israel’s permission to import 200 tons of 
chlorine, but by the end of November it had received only 18 tons – enough for 
one week of chlorinated water. By mid-December Gaza City and the north of Gaza 
had access to water only six hours every three days.

According to the World Health Organisation, the political divisions between Gaza 
and the West Bank are also having a serious impact on drug stocks in Gaza. The 
West Bank Ministry of Health (MOH) is responsible for procuring and delivering 
most of the pharmaceuticals and medical disposables used in Gaza. But stocks are 
at dangerously low levels. Throughout November the MOH West Bank was turning 
shipments away because it had no warehouse space, yet it wasn’t sending supplies 
on to Gaza in adequate quantities. During the week of 30 November, one truck 
carrying drugs and medical supplies from the MOH in Ramallah entered Gaza, the 
first delivery since early September.

The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is 
little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European 
Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with 
Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of 
the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, 
it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – 
which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December 
Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to 
renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.

How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of 
Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 
50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as 
human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.

Sara Roy teaches at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is the 
author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/print/roy_01_.html