Half of Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza malnourished

Almost 46% of Gaza and West Bank households are "food insecure" according to a UN report, and this "food insecurity" is a direct result of the sanctions the US, EU and Israel have imposed on the Palestinians for having the temerity to elect the Hamas government.

The report acknowledges that "traditionally strong ties" among Palestinian families tend to reduce the possibility of "acute household hunger". But it warns that against a background of decreasing food security since the beginning of the Intifada since 2000 and the loss of PA salaries because of the boycott there are now "growing concerns about the sustainability of Palestinians' resilience".

The report is the latest of a series detailing deepening Palestinian poverty as a result of both closures blocking exports from Gaza and the international and Israeli boycott of the PA. Its timing is especially sensitive, coming to light after both Israel and the US indicated that they will maintain the boycott after the planned Fatah Hamas coalition cabinet takes office unless it clearly commits itself to recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence and adherence to previous agreements with Israel.

The UN report says 34 per cent of households - with income below $1.68 per day and/or showing decreasing food expenditures - are "food insecure". The WFP officially defines "food security" as "the ability of a household to produce and/or access at all times the minimum food needed for a healthy and active life". It goes on to say that 12 per cent of households are "vulnerable" to food insecurity.

Nor is any of this unexpected. Indeed, it is actually official Israeli policy. As I reported on April 16th of last year:

The rationale to all this was explained by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, earlier this year. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.'

It is against this reality that one needs to look at Condaleezza Rice's recent visit to the region when she essentially backed Israel's plan not to recognise the new unity government of Palestine and to continue this dreadful regime of sanctions, essentially punishing the Palestinians for voting "the wrong way" in an election.

We are starving these people. And we are doing so deliberately. Dov Weisglass made that intention very clear almost a year ago.

And now we witness Rice flying into the region, mouthing platitudes, and flying out again. By insisting that the new government "recognise" Israel, Rice appears to feel that both she and the Israelis are somehow occupying the moral high ground here. Of course, in order to do so she must ignore the fact that even the Israelis have yet to "recognise" Israel by stating clearly what they define as it's international borders.

I said all this almost a year ago but it's still valid. Indeed, more so the longer this abhorrent starvation policy continues:

"One also notes that, in this US inspired - highly selective- reading of history, the fact that the Israelis are in the middle of a 39 year occupation of Palestinian territory - indeed, the longest occupation in modern history - has been conveniently erased from the American narrative. Or, at the very least, placed to one side as an irrelevance.

The notion that the act of occupation is, of itself, an act of violence is dismissed.

What we are asked to look at and condemn is the reaction to the occupation rather than to condemn the occupation itself. An occupation that is illegal under international law.

Resolution 242 requires that Israel withdraw from all the territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem. The United Nation's General Assembly has repeatedly condemned Israel's occupation of the territories as illegal (see UN resolutions 338, 1397, and 1402, among others).

Again, we are asked to ignore impractical notions such as justice or adherence to international law, and instead we are asked to watch silently as the Palestinians are starved into submission.

Whatever one thinks of the Hamas regime, it is cruel in the extreme to subject Palestinian citizens to this ordeal.

Indeed, terrorising a civilian population with the aim of changing a governments course of actions is the very definition of terrorism.

The Palestinian people have suffered enough. There is no need for those of us here, in the affluent West, to inflict further unnecessary pain upon them.

What is being done here, in our name, I regard as little less than shameful."

And it's not only the fact that what is being done in our name here is shameful, but that it's being done with that totally odious false sense of moral superiority that Condi Rice and the Israelis exude. The moral superiority of the occupier. The kind of attitude that one associates with the British in India or white supremacist South Africans.

And we wonder why they hate us? I mean, seriously, when did you last come across hypocrisy on this scale? When a nation that supposedly invades other country's to promote "democracy", ends up colluding in the starvation of a people because it disagreed with the democratic choice those people made?

It's disgusting. There really is no other word for it.

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Tags: Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Gaza, starvation, sanctions, Condeleezza Rice, Olmert, Hamas, Abbas