UN official says Israel's siege of Gaza breeds extremism and human suffering
A senior United Nations official has issued an unprecedented appeal to British MP's to use their influence to tackle the "indiscriminate" and "illegal" Israeli sanctions in Gaza which he says are "serving the agenda of extremists".
Collective punishment is a war crime and yet that is exactly what the Israelis continue to do to the people of the Gaza strip with the apparent complicity of the US and the EU.In one of the strongest attacks on recent Israeli strategy issued by a senior international official, John Ging, Gaza's director of operations for the refugee agency UNRWA, said that "crushing sanctions" imposed since the Israeli cabinet declared the Strip a "hostile entity" in September had contributed to "truly appalling living conditions."
Mr Ging said the measures had been justified as protection from what he fully acknowledged were rocket attacks "terrorising" the Israeli civilian population within range. The rockets have killed two people this year and injured 99 others. But citing cuts in fuel and planned cuts in electricity along with closures which have had "an atrocious" impact on Palestinian medical care, "destroyed" Gaza's economy and threatened already "Third World" water and sanitation, he told the Britain-Palestine group of MPs: "This presupposes that the civilian population are somehow more capable of stopping the rocket fire than the powerful military of the occupying power.
"My message ... is that not only are these sanctions not working, but because of their profound inhumanity, they are counterproductive to their stated purpose and while Gaza is not yet an entity populated by people hostile to their neighbour, it inevitably will be if the current approach of collective punitive sanctions continues."
Israeli officials cite signs of a decline in Hamas's popularity as evidence that the sanctions are working. But Mr Ging said the "human suffering and misery for the entire civilian population in Gaza was creating fertile ground for the extremists".The question should not be whether or not the sanctions are working, the question should be whether or not the sanctions are legal. Punishing the entire population of Gaza for the actions of the few is collective punishment, whether it is "working" towards Israel's stated purpose of reducing Hamas's popularity or not.
The world's silence as Israel commits these atrocities is actually shocking. I sometimes wonder if we have stopped viewing the Palestinians as people at all. We are certainly astonishingly cavalier towards the levels of hardship these people must endure for crimes that they have not committed.
The Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights says that 11 patients have died since last month because their treatment was blocked or delayed. At least 800 more are being denied treatment abroad.As Ging rightly states, treating people with such barbarism will only drive them into the arms of the extremists. It used to be that we fought extremism by encouraging the democratic ideal. In the case of Palestine, the very opposite has turned out to be the case. It was their democratic decision to elect Hamas that set in motion the series of events which led us to where we are today.
So, if we are not going to tackle extremism by the imposition of the democratic ideal, what are we going to tackle it with?
Israel's answer appears to be collective punishment. That's hardly a noble alternative.
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