Collective Punishment Supports The Agenda Of Terrorists

This statement from John , of the UN’s field office in Gaza, seems worth quoting extensively:

Will the siege of Gaza and the plan to periodically cut off its electricity distance the residents of the Strip from the bad guys and bring them closer to the good guys? According to John Ging, who has been the director of UNRWA’s Gaza field office for the last two years, the mood is swinging in the opposite direction. He says that the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza is turning the Israeli government’s designation of the Strip as a “hostile entity” into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was the main message of a speech the senior UN official delivered last week to a group of British legislators in London.

Here are a few particularly sharp quotes: “Recently, Israel declared Gaza a hostile entity, and on that basis has been implementing a new series of crushing sanctions, significantly adding to the human misery and suffering of 1.5 million civilians in Gaza. Public statements on behalf of the government of Israel link these sanctions to protection of the Israeli civilian population, under daily assault from rockets fired from Gaza. This presupposes that the civilian population is somehow more capable of stopping the rocket fire than the powerful military of the occupying power… Not only are these sanctions not working, but because of their profound inhumanity, they are in fact counterproductive to their stated purpose; and while Gaza is not yet an entity populated by people hostile to their neighbor, it inevitably will be if the current approach of collective punitive sanctions continues.

“You must be on the ground for days and weeks to begin to appreciate the full horror of the situation. … Their [the Gazans’] living conditions continue their relentless downward spiral, to what can now only be described as truly appalling. … This year, 649 Palestinians have been killed and 2819 have been injured, in those figures are the deaths of 63 children with 86 children injured. … Living in the midst of the civilian population are those who are bent on the violent destruction of Israel; they fire rockets into Israel on an almost daily basis, terrorizing the civilian population within range. A total of two Israelis have been killed and 99 injured this year as a result of this rocket fire…

“The impact on the medical situation for those affected is quite simply atrocious: 91 of 416 essential drugs are in chronically short supply or have run out altogether. Almost 800 patients needing treatment abroad are currently denied permission to leave Gaza. It is very difficult to convey through words their physical suffering and the mental anguish caused to their families by these decisions to deny them access to the life-saving medical care that they need.

“The food situation is equally bad, with almost 1.2 million Gazans now relying on handouts from the UN. It is all the more tragic as this is a man-made problem rather than the result of a natural disaster.”

According to UNRWA data that was forwarded to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, prior to his departure for Annapolis, “our available resources are now so overstretched that we are only providing 61 percent of the daily calorie intake needed to sustain life, which means that those who have no other means to supplement our ration are hungry and their nutritional status is in significant decline. At present we do not have sufficient funding to provide just one high-nutrient biscuit per day to the 200,000 school children in UN schools.”

According to Ging, years of living with the occupation, poverty, violence and shortages have led to the collapse of the education system in the Gaza Strip. “The collapse revealed [itself] in failure rates of up to 90 percent in basic literacy and numeracy.

“I am compelled to discard the usual niceties of diplomatic speak and say to you bluntly,” Ging ended his speech to the parliament members, “the current policy of collective punishment and inhumane illegal sanctions against the civilian population in Gaza is actually supporting the agenda of the extremists.”