Israel
Tightens The Siege Of Gaza
By Rick Kelly
07 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
While
the world’s media has focused attention on Israel’s four-week
offensive in Lebanon, a no less ferocious assault is also underway in
Gaza. The Palestinian territory’s 1.4 million residents have been
subjected to an unrelenting Israeli military offensive, as well as an
air, land, and sea blockade which threatens a humanitarian catastrophe.
Seizing upon the pretext
of the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit by Palestinian militants on
June 25, the Israeli military has mounted a six-week campaign aimed
at annihilating the West Bank and Gaza’s entire social, economic,
and political infrastructure.
According to figures published
in last Saturday’s Haaretz, Israeli ground forces have fired 12,000
artillery shells into Gaza in the past five weeks. This is an average
of more than 300 shells a day. In addition, at least 220 aerial strikes
take place each day. Israeli ground forces, including infantry, tanks,
and bulldozers have launched regular incursions into the area. This
firepower is concentrated on one of the world’s most densely populated
areas, which is seven times smaller than Rhode Island, the smallest
US state.
In the latest bombardment,
Israeli forces have launched a sustained operation in Rafah in south
Gaza over the past five days. Tanks and soldiers have taken over the
area, conducting house-to-house searches, and destroying greenhouses
and farmlands. Eight Palestinians were killed Saturday. At least three
of these were civilians—including an eight-year-old boy—who
were bombed as they fled Israeli gunfire.
Raids and assassinations
have also taken place in the West Bank. In the latest provocation, two
Hamas legislators, on of them Abdel Aziz Duaik, the speaker of the parliament,
were kidnapped on the weekend. Israel has now imprisoned 33 parliamentarians,
including eight Hamas cabinet members.
The Israeli military actions
in Gaza and the West Bank demonstrate that its offensive has nothing
to do with recovering the captured soldier, or with preventing “terrorism”.
The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has rejected repeated Hamas
offers of a ceasefire, and has refused to accept proposals by Palestinian
militants for a prisoner exchange. Every Palestinian offer is met with
renewed Israeli bombardment.
Countless war crimes have
been committed in Gaza. An investigation by the Israeli human rights
organisation B’Tselem found that half of all those killed in the
territory last month—178 people—were civilians. Hundreds
of others have suffered terrible injuries. At one Gaza hospital, surgeons
told the BBC that of 100 operations, one-third were amputations caused
by Israeli attacks.
“There are many more
mutilations requiring amputations as well as severe burns now than there
were before,” William Dufourcq from the aid organisation Médecins
du Monde reported. “This means the hospitals stay full for longer
and there is a greater need for skilled specialists as well as more
drugs, which were already in short supply. These people will be handicapped
for life.”
July was the bloodiest month
in the Occupied Territories since April 2002. In an indication of the
one-sided nature of the “war”, just one Israeli soldier
has been killed in the past five weeks, and that was in a “friendly-fire”
incident.
B’Tselem also catalogued
a series of incidents in which Palestinian civilians, including children
and the elderly, had been deliberately bombed by Israeli fighter planes
and helicopters. Just as in Lebanon, Israel’s offensive is calculated
to terrorise the entire population and suppress all resistance to the
Israeli occupation.
In a new tactic, the Israeli
army now telephones Palestinian residents and warns them to flee their
home just moments before it is bombed. While the military claims that
this practice is designed to reduce civilian casualties, it is in fact
intended to instil fear into the thousands of families who receive such
calls.
“Some families, convinced
by such calls, have left their homes at two o’clock in the morning
only to see them bombed directly by Israeli F-16 fighters,” Al-Ahram
Weekly reported. “Others have abandoned their homes and seen them
stand untouched. So fearful are they that they refuse to return in case
bombings are merely delayed.”
The IDF has also dropped
leaflets in many areas of Gaza demanding that people flee their homes.
With every border sealed off, however, there is nowhere for people to
go. That there is not an exodus from the Palestinian territory equivalent
to that in Lebanon is due to the fact that Gazan residents are hemmed
in on all sides by Israel.
The Israeli blockade has
greatly exacerbated the humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Territories.
Nine UN humanitarian organisations working in Gaza last week issued
a joint statement expressing their “deep alarm” at the impact
of the ongoing violence. “We are concerned that with international
attention focusing on Lebanon, the tragedy in Gaza is being forgotten,”
the statement read.
One aid organisation reported
that Israel was permitting just 150 food and aid trucks into Gaza each
day—just enough to keep the population from starving. More than
400 daily truckloads are estimated to be required to meet people’s
nutritional needs and provide some measure of food security.
Gaza is also suffering from
worsening power and fuel shortages. Israel destroyed the territory’s
only electricity station on June 28. Some Palestinian homes receive
6 to 8 hours of electricity each day, while others face constant blackouts.
Several hospitals rely on generators to operate minimal services but
are running out of fuel. Many medical services and operations have been
cancelled, while hospitals’ food supplies, medicines, blood banks,
and vaccines have been destroyed, as refrigerators no longer work.
Israeli attacks on Gaza’s
infrastructure have also caused water shortages and damaged sewerage
systems. Humanitarian organisations have warned of epidemics as a result
of the increasingly unsanitary conditions in the territory.
Gaza’s economy has
been crippled by Israeli border closures, and destruction of infrastructure,
factories, and farmlands. Poverty and unemployment have skyrocketted,
following the imposition of the Israeli and international financial
embargo of the Palestinian Authority following Hamas’s victory
in the January elections. Many of the PA’s 140,000 employees have
not received their wages in months.
The UN’s World Food
Program has increased the number of people it feeds by 38 percent since
the beginning of the year. Shortages have led to price rises, making
basic foodstuffs unaffordable and threatening mass malnutrition. The
cost of wheat flour, for example, has increased by 15 percent since
January. Other foods have entirely disappeared from markets. Fish is
no longer available due to an Israeli ban on Palestinian fishing, which
has also eliminated the income of about 35,000 people.
As in Lebanon, Israel’s
war crimes in the Occupied Territories have received the full backing
of the US. Washington has failed to even issue the once customary calls
for “restraint” on both sides. The Bush administration makes
no secret of the fact that it considers the destruction of all Palestinian
resistance to the Israeli occupation an essential part of its drive
to forge a “new Middle East” under US domination. This is
why Israel feels free to continue its onslaught on Gaza.