People are being forced to cut household spending to "survival levels". "[T]he embargo has had a devastating effect for a large proportion of households who have had to make major changes on the composition of their food basket," causing a "[steady] rise" in "chronic malnutrition". The poorest two-fifths of the population now survive on only 50p per person per day, and many have been forced to sell jewellery and even household appliances to buy food and other necessities.

The Red Cross concludes that if the blockade is not halted "economic disintegration will continue and wider segments of the Gaza population will become food insecure", while "the prolongation of the restrictions [on trade] risks permanently damaging households' capacity to recover and undermines their ability to attain food security in the long term." Only a removal of the embargo "can reverse the trend of impoverishment".

The Red Cross' findings, shocking as they are, are fully consistent with what the UN, the World Bank and leading human rights organisations have been reporting since early 2006, when the current siege began. To call the present situation in the occupied territories a "humanitarian crisis" is slightly misleading in that it suggests a lack of agency behind it. In truth, the civilian population of Gaza has been "intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution" with the tacit complicity or, in our case, the active participation of the entire international community. Unlike with a natural disaster or drought, the devastation in Gaza is entirely artificial, man-made, deliberate.  Moreover, there was nothing inevitable about any of this. Israel, the U.S. and the EU could have responded to the outcome of the January 2006 elections with a recognition that Hamas was now the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and a commitment to pursue all diplomatic possibilities with it on that basis. Instead Hamas' conciliatory overtures were flatly rejected - only yesterday it emerged that the Bush administration received, and completely ignored, a letter sent by Hamas in June 2006 offering "a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and ... a truce for many years" and calling for "direct negotiations" with the U.S. government - in favour of a regime of severe economic strangulation and massive violence directed against the civilian population of the West Bank and Gaza, openly aimed at removing Hamas from office.

The ceasefire

The "unprecedented ... humanitarian implosion" (.pdf) currently underway in Gaza and, to a slightly lesser degree, the West Bank is the predicted, fully intended result of these policies. In June of this year a ceasefire was agreed between Israel and the various militant groups in Gaza. Hamas had been calling for a comprehensive ceasefire with Israel for months, a proposal Israel repeatedly rejected in favour of a sharp escalation in violence, killing more than double the number of people in Gaza in the first three months of 2008 than in the corresponding period of the previous three years combined. When this failed to weaken Hamas' hold on the Strip, or even to decrease the number of Qassams being fired at Israel (indeed it, of course, achieved precisely the opposite), the Israeli government finally, reluctantly agreed to a ceasefire.

There had been hope that the truce would lead to an end to the blockade and a substantial easing of the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Instead, Gaza has remained in a state of "virtual siege" (.pdf) in which "[s]hortages of electricity, fuel, safe water and sanitation frame daily life", while the general population has seen "few dividends from the ceasefire". Israel permitted virtually "no improvement in the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza" and there was "no relaxation of the total ban on exports" (.pdf), a prerequisite for the revival of the Gazan economy.

All of which meant that the eruption of violence over the past week, precipitated by an Israeli strike in Gaza, was always a mere matter of time. While Hamas has an interest in continuing the truce, the difficulty of keeping the other factions in line while retaining political credibility makes it impossible to maintain indefinitely under conditions of "virtual siege" in which the wider population sees "few dividends from the ceasefire". Whether Israel wants the truce to continue is less clear. The ruling Kadima party will not want a sustained resumption of hostilities prior to the February elections, and in any case the government is quite content with the status quo of a besieged, isolated and quiet Gaza, which leaves it free to annexe and dismember the West Bank without fear of even minimal resistance. On the other hand, Israel is determined to prevent Hamas from establishing and taking credit for stability in Gaza, fearing that the international community - and a future Obama administration in particular - might be tempted to end the current policy of isolation and begin diplomatic engagement with it.

Food blockade

For the past 10 days Gaza's border crossings have been almost completely closed, preventing the delivery of food, humanitarian supplies and medicine. This in a place where 80% of the population depends upon international food aid for mere survival. A lack of fuel led Gaza's only power plant to shut down on Thursday, causing massive blackouts. According to Palestinian officials the plant will be forced to shut down again tonight if fuel delivery is not resumed. On Tuesday UNRWA, which supplies 750,000 people (roughly half Gaza's population) with food aid, warned that unless the "inhuman" blockade was eased it would run out of food supplies within two days. Israel refused to permit emergency food supplies to be transferred, and on Thursday UNRWA was forced to suspend food distribution. Today UNRWA closed down its food distribution centres in Gaza, on the grounds that its warehouses are empty (an unprecedented situation). 20,000 people who were due to collect supplies of rice, flour, sugar and oil (according to the Red Cross, a large proportion of the population now obtains 80% of their calories from cereals, sugar and oil) today left with their hands and stomachs empty. UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness commented:

"The message today is simple and clear. We have no food, our warehouses are empty, people will start to go hungry. Hungry and desperate people on the borders of Israel are not in the interests of peace...

"The UN at every level condemns the [Qassam] rockets. I again condemn them now. But more than half of the Gaza [S]trip are children. They, the elderly, the sick, the babies, the disabled, the blind [and] the deaf must not be punished because of the actions of the few."

The UN Secretary General's performance thoughout all this has been typically dreadful, but even he emphasised yesterday that "measures which increase the hardship and suffering of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip as a whole are unacceptable and should cease immediately". The EU Commissioner for External Relations called on Israel to "re-open the crossings for humanitarian and commercial flows, in particular food and medicines" and fuel, noting pointedly that "[i]nternational law requires the provision of access to essential services such as electricity and clean water to the civilian population." Oxfam called on the international community to "step up and exercise all their political might to break the blockade of Gaza ... without delay" as "a matter of humanitarian imperative", while Amnesty International condemned the "latest tightening of the blockade" as "nothing short of collective punishment" that has "made an already dire humanitarian situation markedly worse."

For over two years Israel's explicit policy towards Gaza has been to systematically destroy its economy and reduce its population to aid dependency, while permitting just enough humanitarian assistance to trickle through to prevent mass death. With Israel's Defense Minister responding to the near unanimous calls for an end to the siege and warnings of an impending humanitarian catastrophe by threatening nothing less than a full-scale military offensive, that last qualification appears increasingly to have become irrelevant.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander