Israel’s long-standing blockade of Gaza is serving only to impoverish the people and play into the hands of extremists in the Middle East, according to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
“I urge Israel to lift its harsh restrictions in order to ease the plight of civilians and bring an end to the closure,” the UN chief declared in a speech to the UN’s Human Rights Council.
“Keeping a large and dense population in unremitting poverty is in nobody’s interest except that of the most extreme radicals in the region,” he added.
Israel claims the economic blockade on Gaza is in place for security reasons, but it includes purely economic and humanitarian resources as well as other non-military items including children’s toys.
Several fact-finding missions in Gaza, including one by the International Committee of the Red Cross, have claimed the blockade is illegal. It has subjected Gazans to collective punishment in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.”
According to one UN 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, while at least two-thirds of Gazan households lack reliable access to food as a result of the blockade.
"GOD BLESS AMERICA"
Besieged Palestinian Gaza is an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly…and, surprise, surprise – they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment? Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now under attack you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an accommodation. And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.
Yes, yes, yes…we know! Now, here's the question: what is the UN going to do about it?
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70+ years later, the silence is still deafening…