Summary
Israel’s siege of Gaza, begun as early as 2006 and maintained with Western and some Arab complicity, as documented in Chapters 14 and 15 of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PDF p.187-188, p.196, p.199).
Details
- More than 80 percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them refugees of the 1948 Nakba, were pushed into poverty and dependency; more than 95 percent of factories were forced to shut; forty thousand students were denied enrollment in the UN school system for 2010–11; hundreds of patients, particularly cancer and kidney patients, died after being denied access to treatment outside Gaza (PDF p.187-188).
- WHO figures cited: anemia in more than two-thirds of children aged one and younger and stunted growth reaching 30 percent among children under five in parts of northern Gaza; sonic booms caused, per a UN report, “anxiety attacks, bedwetting, muscle spasms, temporary loss of hearing and breathing difficulties” (PDF p.188).
- Richard Falk called the siege a prelude to “genocide” and “a Holocaust in the making”; Sara Roy charges the accompanying “de-development” policy with “killing any possibility of creating an independent and sovereign Palestinian state”, and the policy “amounts to collective punishment, as most legal experts agree” (PDF p.187).
- UNRWA commissioner-general Karen Koenig AbuZayd warned Gaza was on the threshold of becoming “the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution” with the international community’s knowledge and acquiescence (PDF p.189).
- After the 2010 flotilla attack, Israel’s announced “easing” of the siege met universal skepticism; the ICRC urged lifting it completely, and Israel’s June 25 seizure of Norwegian-donated oxygen machines for Gaza and West Bank hospitals is cited against the announcement (PDF p.199). Jeff Halper describes the calorie regime imposed on Gaza’s population, with Dov Weisglass’s dietitian joke (PDF p.200).
Related pages
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, Freedom Flotilla, Richard Falk