Palestinians forced to scavenge for food on rubbish dumps
Whilst Blair and others make such a huge fuss over the fact that the Israeli military blockade of Lebanon has been lifted, it is often forgotten that the blockade of the Palestinians is continuing.
Israel closed all entry and exit points to the Gaza Strip on the 25th of June and have been conducting bombing raids there ever since resulting in 262 deaths and the injuries of more than 1200 people. Indeed, there has been a campaign of attempting to starve the Palestinians ever since they elected Hamas as their representatives.
But any hope that such a tactic would lead to the collapse of the government of Hamas - many of whom are currently in Israeli jails since the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit - has been shown as fantasy.
"The pressure and tactics have not resulted in a desire for compromise," Karen Abuzayd, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency is said to have warned. "But rather they have created mass despair, anger and a sense of hopelessness and abandonment."The disgrace is that all of this is taking place whilst the world silently looks away. It is now being reported that many Palestinians are being forced to scavenge for food on rubbish dumps:
The policy of starving the Palestinians is not even one that Israel have taken care to hide. As I reported at the time, the Israelis were very open about their intention as stated by Dov Weisglass: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.""Women in Gaza tell me they are eating only one meal a day, bread with tomatoes or cheap vegetables," said Kirstie Campbell of the UN's World Food Programme, which is feeding 235,000 people. She added that in June, since when the crisis has worsened, some 70 per cent of people in Gaza could not meet their family's food needs. "People are raiding garbage dumps," she said.
Not only do Palestinians in Gaza get little to eat but what food they have is eaten cold because of the lack of electricity and money to pay for fuel. The Gaza power plant was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in June. In one month alone 4 per cent of Gaza's agricultural land was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers.
The total closure imposed by Israel, supplemented by deadly raids, has led to the collapse of the Gazan economy. The 35,000 fishermen cannot fish because Israeli gunboats will fire on them if they go more than a few hundred yards from the shore. At the same time the international boycott of the Hamas government means that there is no foreign aid to pay Palestinian government employees. The government used to have a monthly budget of $180-200m, half of which went to pay 165,000 public sector workers. But it now has only $25m a month.
Surely when a population is reduced to scavenging in rubbish dumps for food it is time for all of us to say, enough is enough.
The Israelis may not like the choice of leadership that the Palestinians have elected, but if we believe in democracy then we should respect the wishes of the Palestinian electorate.
It is time to stop punishing them and to start asking why they made the choice they made. All citizenship's choose leaders who they regard as strong when they perceive themselves to be under threat. Israel's actions are only exacerbating the problem, not relieving it.
The message Blair should be carrying to Tel Aviv is that it is time for Israel to negotiate with the duly elected representatives of the Palestinian people rather than jailing them.
And it is certainly time that the EU demanded that this inhumane policy of starvation be brought to an immediate end.
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