12/28: Latest News from Israel Attack Gaza

Latest News Citizens For Legitimate Government
28 Dec 2008
http://www.legitgov.org/

Israeli troops mobilize as Gaza assault widens, bomb university, tunnel, possible ground attack while Britain and US refuse to demand end to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and US veto blocks UN anti-Israel resolution + Obama's silence on Israeli airstrikes and Pelosi says US must stand strongly with Israel...

If Gaza Falls . . .

Sara Roy
London Review of Books
1 January 2009

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

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.