In particular, the report warns that Israel’s blockade has destroyed the enclave’s health and education services and is leaving much of the population in a state of constant food insecurity. The Strip’s infrastructure is devastated from the 2008 Israeli bombardment “Operation Cast Lead,” in which up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed and 5,500 injured.

Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor slammed the United Nations for the report, saying that discussing the human rights situation in Gaza was a “waste of time” and that the real humanitarian crisis was in southern Israel, where often homemade rockets occasionally hit empty fields.

The UN also warned that there were concerns about human rights in the West Bank, particularly in Area C where Palestinian civilians are under constant threat of expulsion to allow more construction of settlements.

The revelation is hardly a surprise, as Israeli Military Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz has repeatedly pressed for an invasion of the Gaza Strip over the past few months, while trumpeting the late 2008 invasion as a “great success.”

Officials today indicated that the next invasion would be very much on the same model as 2008, which saw massive Palestinian civilian casualties and destruction of considerable civilian infrastructure, much of which remains unrepaired as an Israeli blockade has prevented construction materials from being imported.

Israeli officials cited “increased weaponry” in the Gaza Strip as the reason for the upcoming invasion, particularly anti-tank weapons. Other than getting some of their tanks blown up, it isn’t clear why they consider this a good reason to invade, as weapons have been flooding much of the region since the Libyan regime fell and their weapons warehouses were looted.

The exact timing of the invasion will also be tricky, as Israel will of course rely on the US to run interference in the UN when the ugliest aspects of the war begin to trickle out. The last invasion came after the 2008 US Presidential election but was virtually wrapped up before President Obama took office. It may be that Israel will try a similar strategy of starting the war after the vote in an effort to keep it from being a political issue in the US.

Israel insisted that they were “unaware” of any such moves, but reports have been emerging over the past few weeks that the group is looking to transform itself into a non-violent movement, inspired by the success of the Arab Spring revolutions.

Israel has been railing at the idea of Palestinian unity, and insisting that they will withdraw from all peace talks (not that there have been any) if Fatah has a rapprochement with Hamas. The move would be more difficult to justify, however, if Hamas manages to transition toward non-violence.

The prospect speaks to a strategy that the Israeli military has feared for quite some time, as military planners have warned that they don’t believe they could crush an Arab Spring style popular uprising.

Gantz went on to praise the 2008-09 invasion of the strip, which killed 1,417 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, saying it was an “excellent operation that achieved deterrence.”

That “deterrence” however, Gantz saw as running out “over time,” even though its been less than three years since then and Israel has been bombing the strip regularly throughout that period. He insisted the timing of the new invasion would be dictated by conditions on the ground, and that the military would act “when the conditions are right.”

The comments come as Israeli officials are slamming the idea of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip joining the Palestinian Liberation Organization, but it does not seem that there is any particular increase in tensions from the strip itself that Israeli diplomats could use to justify what Gantz promised would be a particularly “painful” incursion.

After initially claiming they hit a “Hamas training camp,” Israeli military officials conceded that the strike actually destroyed the house full of civilians. They expressed “regret” over the killings, but insisted it was all Hamas’ fault for having training camps.

Gaza militant factions responded to the killings with a “barrage” of 12 rockets fired against targets inside Israel. The US-funded “Iron Dome” system managed to shoot one of the rockets down, and the others all landed in open fields, causing no damage.

Gaza PM Ismail Haniyeh reported that his government is in talks with regional parties to end the air strikes from both sides, saying that they were working to stop the situation from escalating.

The former Israel Defense Forces officer claimed that Israeli policy in the West Bank caused terror levels to “drop to zero,” but that Gaza had been allowed to thrive.

A “negligence of the military side,” he said “has [sic] meant that while in the West Bank we took care to tend to the lawn, in Gaza, since we didn’t, thorns had grown into tree trunks, and, in the end, we’ll have to go in there with bulldozers,” Galant said.

Whether the people of Gaza feel they have been “neglected” by Israel’s “military side” is another question. In the Israeli assault on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 - Operation Cast Lead – up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, 5,000 injured, and billions of dollars of infrastructure damage and numerous incidents of IDF attacks on civilian facilities.

Since then, Gaza has been unable to re-build in part due to an aggressive sanctions regime imposed by Israel which bans most imports and causes immense human suffering. The conclusions of a September U.N. report claimed the blockade is illegal. It has subjected Gazans to collective punishment in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law,” it said.

According to one of the U.N. special rapporteurs, about one third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 percent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israeli military measures.

A report of the Secretary General to the U.N. Security Council in April reported that Gazan civilians are attacked by Israeli forces while in Gaza’s so-called “buffer zone,” about 300 metros from the Gaza fence. “In 2010,” said the report, “40 boys and 4 girls were allegedly injured by Israeli fire in or near the buffer zone. Of those, 26 boys, some as young as 13, were shot while collecting gravel within 800 metres of the fence. In cases where sworn affidavits were taken, 19 children were shot in the leg, 2 in the arm and 1 child was shot in the head.”

Major General Galant appears not to have considered whether intense military and economic subjugation may have more to do with the growth of what he calls “thorns [growing] into tree trunks.”

Its rarely talked about in detail, but Israeli drones overhead are a daily occurrence in Gaza, and the densely populated enclave has seen at least 825 people slain in drone attacks since mid-2006.

A broad overview on the devastating air war is available today at the Washington Post, providing a unique level of insight into the constant surveillance carried out by drone, and its effect on the population.

Click here to read more at the Washington Post

Hamas officials say that the sides have quietly agreed to keep the current system - a Hamas-run Gaza Strip and Fatah-run West Bank, until next year’s elections, supposed to be held in May. The two sides had been close to such a deal but were delayed by disputes over who would take which positions in the unity.

But Israeli officials had threatened several measures in response. Over the weekend, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon even suggested that Israel would cut off the water supply and electricity to the Gaza Strip as protest for the unity government.

Israel supplies around 70 percent of the electricity to the Gaza Strip, but virtually all of the drinking water, and would have cut pretty much the entire water supply from 1.5 million people in the strip.

Israel greenlighted a military invasion of Gaza at the start of the month, but the prospect of such an attack seemed to be slowing with a lull in Israeli attacks and missile firings.

But recently things are looking to escalate again, with Israeli warplanes pounding the Strip on Sunday night, wounding the French consul and causing his wife to have a miscarriage. The French government said they are “all for Israeli security” but weren’t pleased that it meant attacking their consul.

The last full-fledged invasion of Gaza came in early 2009, an invasion which left over 1,400 Palestinians slain and over 5,000 wounded, the vast majority civilians. Whether or not a new one is actually in the offing is unclear, however, as Gantz comments were in the context of railing against budget cuts and he might just be trying to squeeze a little extra funding out of the Knesset instead of making a serious policy recommendation.

Israeli officials were quick to condemn the move as a “provocation” and claimed that an attempt to deliver aid amounted to a “deplorable propaganda exercise.” The ships are currently in international waters.

The ships left from the Turkish port of Fethiye today, and were supposed to sail to Rhodes, according to Turkish officials. Instead the ships are heading to Gaza, with 19 activists and five journalists between them.

The sail was something of a surprise and activists from the two ships said they deliberately kept a low profile until reaching international waters, fearing that they would be detained in port or sabotaged like previous ships.