Ten years ago the United Nations published an alarming report on the future of the Gaza Strip warning that without urgent remedial action, the territory would not be a liveable place by 2020 and its economy would become ‘fundamentally unviable’.  Far from receiving the infrastructural investment it so desperately needs, Gaza has been catapulted into a deeper humanitarian crisis and the UN’s dire predictions have been realised.  Gaza’s unemployment rate is 50% and 62% of its people are food insecure.  So, Gaza is not a liveable place yet 2.1 million Palestinians live there, of whom 1.4 million (over 70% of the population) are registered refugees with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).  Israel’s blockade, now in its 15th year, ‘has devastated Gaza’s economy, caused widespread destruction and left most people largely cut off from the outside world’.  Amnesty International has condemned the blockade’s ‘collective punishment’ of the civilian population of Gaza which Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Territories, argues is ‘clearly forbidden’ under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Although Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza in 2005, it continues to control the territory’s borders, coastline and airspace and is internationally recognised as the occupying power responsible for the safety and welfare of civilians under its occupation.  Yet, since 2008, Israel has launched four major military offensives on Gaza, most recently in May 2021, which resulted in 261 Palestinians killed, over 2,200 injured, US$380 million in infrastructure damage and $190 million in economic losses.  But beyond the material hardship created by poor housing, malnutrition, sanitation and high unemployment is the silent epidemic of a mental health crisis.  22% (410,684) of Gaza’s population is in need of psycho-social support, of whom 270,000 are children.  Their education is already compromised as nearly 70% of schools in Gaza either double- or triple-shift which means that one school building is shared by two or even three different school populations.  Most of Gaza’s children are therefore consigned to a part-time education.

The vulnerabilities of Gaza’s mostly refugee population have been preyed upon by the COVID-19 pandemic both in terms of its impact on an already overwhelmed health service and downward pressure on the economy and incomes.    Medical Aid for Palestinians has reported 227,539 COVID-19 cases and 1,799 deaths in Gaza with pandemic mobility restrictions impacting access to healthcare and emergency nutrition services.  53% of households experienced a drop in their monthly income as a result of COVID-19 with 51% of workers in Gaza employed in the informal economy which made them more vulnerable to temporary or permanent redundancy during the pandemic.

As COVID-19 has deepened the dependency of Palestinian refugees in Gaza on UNRWA services, the agency is experiencing an existential funding crisis with Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s Commissioner-General, announcing in November 2021 that it was unable to pay all 28,000 of its staff, the majority of whom are Palestinian refugees.  Although most of the cuts to UNRWA’s budget by the Trump administration were restored by President Biden, the agency has been hit by a reduction in funding by other donors.  UNRWA spokesperson, Tamara Alrifai suggests that the agency ‘is under intense politically motivated attacks that seek to question its legitimacy and undermine its added value, in an attempt to weaken the rights of Palestinian refugees’.  ‘The chronic underfunding of UNRWA’, she argues, ‘has created immense distress to the agency, to the staff and to the refugee community’.

Over the 15 years of the blockade of Gaza, Israel has not been held to account for what Amnesty International calls ‘its systematic and widespread violations and crimes under international law against the Palestinian population’.  What has changed, however, is that international human rights organisations (B’tselem, in January 2021, Human Rights Watch in April 2021, and Amnesty International in February 2022) have forensically applied the tenets of international human rights and humanitarian law to Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine and concluded that it has established a system of apartheid.  This is something that Palestinian NGOs have been documenting for over 25 years.

Moreover, in March 2021, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court opened a formal investigation into alleged war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2014, a move welcomed for opening the possibility of accountability for grave human rights abuses.  In light of its report, Amnesty International has called on the ICC ‘to consider the applicability of the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current formal investigation’.  As Raji Sourani, Director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, has said ‘a new stage of struggle has started at the international level to take down apartheid and end all its crimes against the Palestinian civilians’.  The deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza demands that all states, particularly close allies of Israel, join this struggle.

Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education and Editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review.

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