No one seems to hear the cries from Gaza enough to act, despite the reports  that talk about imminent economic collapse, dangerous food shortages, total  aid dependency and impending humanitarian disaster. Neither the cries nor  the reports appear in the headlines or news alerts in our mainstream media.   And, while the statistics make shocking reading when they do emerge, it is  the cries that we should be hearing because they come from people like us –  real flesh and blood people who bleed, feel pain and grieve.   They are the  cries that give rise to the statistics, the cries of Palestinians no less  human and no less vulnerable than any one of us would be as prisoners of  Israel‘s merciless occupation.

For all the recent news about the infighting that has gripped internal  Palestinian politics, there is no mistaking under whose suffocating matrix  of control, the Palestinians are actually forced to live.  Israel has  threatened the Palestinians’ right to exist on their own land since it was  created and it has no more disengaged from Gaza than it has from the West  Bank.  Instead, Israel has made a prison of Gaza and completely sealed it  off from the West Bank and the outside world. Deeming it a place too  dangerous to visit, Israel likes to portray the Palestinians as a violent  people whose acts of resistance threaten Israel’s existence and necessitate  the punitive measures that Israel takes against them.  However, according to  international law, resistance is a legitimate response of an occupied people  and collective punishment by an Occupying Power against a civilian  population is prohibited.  The outrage in all this is the world’s  acquiescence to Israel‘s suppression of the Palestinians and the oppressive  force it uses to reduce them to a sub-human existence.   This cuts to the  core of our humanity and it is simply not enough to say, “there but for the  grace of God go I”.

 

Grim as the facts and figures are, they can never make us feel the agony of  the mother who does not have a grain of rice left to feed her starving  children, the desperation of the father who cannot get his sick child  through the closed border crossing for treatment in Egypt, the terror of the  child who wets the bed every night wondering if the soldiers will come again  to ransack the house, the constant fear of schoolchildren knowing that even  school is no haven from soldiers’ bullets and mortar fire, the despairing  distress of families who are not even given time to save their belongings as  bulldozers come to tear down their homes, the desolation of thousands of  people with no jobs to go to, the helplessness of thousands more who have  received no wages for months and the wretchedness of the starving families  who depend on the jobless and the unpaid. An entire population is in shut  down – more than a million stories of agonising pain and overwhelming grief.   But, no one is hearing the cries.

 

The shortages are getting worse by the day.  Food is running out, fuel is  running out, medicines are running out. There has been almost no electricity  since Israel bombed Gaza‘s only power plant last year. Without electricity,  water cannot be pumped. Without fuel, sewage cannot be pumped and the sewage  is spilling out onto the streets contaminating the meagre water supplies  left.  The stench of open sewage hangs over every neighbourhood increasing  the risk of disease and contagion.  Running water is a luxury few have now,  most having to queue to buy it.  Children go out with plastic bottles and  buckets to get their rations of water when and if supplies arrive.  There is  no refrigeration for fresh foods and in any case no fresh food is available.  Even a staple like wheat is running out as the 600 tons of wheat needed  daily is not getting through the Karni commercial crossing. Wherever one  looks, there are faces of despair, but the very human cries from the depths  of all this misery are not being heard.

 

Hospitals are overflowing with wounded people from Israel‘s aerial attacks  and mortar shelling. Operating equipment is unusable as generators can no  longer run without fuel.  There are no medicines for the heart patients,  diabetics, cancer sufferers and so many others. Doctors, nurses and health  care workers are stretched to the limit trying to save lives and stop the  pain when their own situations are desperate at home. Essential services can  no longer cope with the demand.  People are dying in their homes because  they cannot get critical health care. Children are literally wasting away  from malnutrition as they try to survive on a daily diet of bread and tea.  Extreme hunger has driven many to scavenging the rubbish tips to find what  they can to feed their families. And everywhere one looks, the greyness of  dying has dulled the lifeblood of the people and still no one hears the  cries of the sick and the wounded, the starving and the homeless and the  keening sounds of people mourning their dead.

 

The list of impossible deprivations is about as awful as anyone wants to  imagine. And with that come the daily, even hourly humiliations and  indignities as Palestinians are pushed, prodded and targeted by Israel’s  soldiers, bombs, tanks, gun ships, warplanes and armed helicopters – an  awesome military line-up against a population that has nothing even  comparable to fight back.  This tiny teeming piece of Palestine has been  reduced to a gigantic penitentiary in which the entire one and a half  million Palestinian population is permanently incarcerated. And, it is in  this violent unforgiving world that Israel continues to indiscriminately  punish the people, their cries only muffled by the firing of mortar shells  and the explosion of bombs dropped from the sky.

 

Amidst all this chaos, the effects of the sanctions are painfully obvious.   One by one, factories and businesses have closed, government services have  folded and jobs have become non-existent.  So draconian are the sanctions  and closures that the Palestinians in Gaza are likely to become one hundred  per cent aid-dependent indefinitely. It is almost impossible now for an  economy that had shown some promise before the imposition of sanctions, to  recover.  The lush market gardens that produced an abundance of fruit and  vegetables lie dry and fallow without water while those first crops intended  for export markets ended up rotting on trucks as they waited in long queues  for clearance to leave Gaza, and none ever did. Nothing can get into Gaza  either except for the most basic food aid, forcing many factories, unable to  produce without the necessary materials, to shut their doors. Without  supplies, businesses have also been forced to close, plunging both shop and  factory owners into penury along with the rest of the population. 

 

The deliberate ruination of the Gazan economy and the gradual disintegration  of Palestinian society are entirely man-made.  As the eye takes in the  bombarded landscape, it is hard to imagine that the old Gaza was once a  wealthy and important trading place where proud and dignified people  welcomed travellers who came by land and sea.  It is hard to imagine that  its capital – Gaza City – was really once a beautiful metropolis with wide  roads and parks, swaying palm trees and an expansive seascape. Over the  years, hospitals, universities, schools and municipal council buildings have  added a modern layer to one of the world’s oldest cities, developing and  expanding despite Israel‘s occupation.  But all that has been destroyed and  nobody seems to care what will happen to the shadows of people merging into  the rubble.  The worst of it is that Israel is supported – even praised –  for what it is doing in the name of security when by any other name it is  purely and simply ethnic cleansing.  And with every moment of our silence,  we acquiesce and give support to the atrocities that are being committed in  our name.

 

As the siege on Palestinian life in Gaza tightens further, nobody asks what  Israel plans to do with the Palestinians. For more than a year, various  bodies have warned about the imminent collapse of Gaza‘s economy and social  order.  The list is formidable – the World Bank, Oxfam, UNRWA, CARE  International, the World Food Program,  B’Tselem, World Vision, UNOCHA,  Amnesty International, ECOSOC to name a few,  but nothing has been done  other than to provide basic food aid. Israel, on the other hand, has only  increased the pressure by refusing to open border crossings between Gaza and  the outside world, refusing the transfer of funds and monetary aid and  refusing to allow international NGOs to operate their assistance programs in  Gaza.  Its acts of violence have not ceased either. Rumours of a large-scale  Israeli military operation which were already circulating well before Hamas  ousted Fatah forces in Gaza, is more than likely still on the table.  It  will only be a matter of time before Israel will act to quell any eruption  from this suffocating mass of humanity, no doubt citing a security threat as  is Israel‘s wont.  The action then is likely to be just as merciless as it  was last year when Israel’s bombers strafed the Gazan landscape targeting  everything in sight – cities, villages, farmlands, schools, hospitals,  government buildings, roads, bridges and essential services and the civilian  population that could find no refuge anywhere and could not even flee out of  Gaza.

 

Despite all the warnings and evidence on the ground, Gaza continues to slide  dangerously towards a humanitarian disaster and world governments have done  absolutely nothing to stop it. There has not been a word of censure against  Israel and the international community’s craven silence will only embolden  Israel to continue its cruel, punitive actions against Gaza‘s already  traumatised and dying people.  We can choose to hear their cries or ignore  them, but we certainly cannot say that “we did not know”. 

 

 

 

Sonja Karkar is the founder and president of Women for Palestine and also  a founding member of the steering committee of Australians for Palestine in  Melbourne, Australia.  See www.womenforpalestine.com and www.australiansforpalestine.com

 

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