Living Conditions in Gaza

It’s probably just the well-known anti-Israeli bias of the Condé Nast corporation at work, but I certainly found Lawrence Wright’s description of living conditions in the Gaza Strip to be pretty affecting. It seems to me that a lot of the huffing and puffing you hear about this person’s bias or that person’s moral equivalence is about trying to distract people from looking clearly at what’s going on:

Israeli patrols tightly enforce a three-mile limit in the Mediterranean and fire on boats that approach the line. [...]

The Israeli blockade includes a ban on toys, so the only playthings available have been smuggled, at a premium, through tunnels from Egypt [...]

Many of Gaza’s sports facilities have been destroyed by Israeli bombings, including the headquarters for the Palestinian Olympic team. [...]

Israeli authorities maintain a list of about three dozen items that they permit into Gaza, but the list is closely kept and subject to change. Almost no construction materials—such as cement, glass, steel, or plastic pipe—have been allowed in, on the ground that such items could be used for building rockets or bunkers. [...]

According to Haaretz, the I.D.F. has calculated that a hundred and six truckloads of humanitarian relief are needed every day to sustain life for a million and a half people. But the number of trucks coming into Gaza has fallen as low as thirty-seven. [...]

Until Operation Cast Lead, there were several concrete plants, a flour mill, and an ice-cream factory, but they have all been bombed or bulldozed, and the mixing trucks for the concrete have been knocked over. Houses and mosques and shops lie in rubble; entire neighborhoods have been demolished. [...]

Most economic activity came to a halt in 2007, with the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Now, according to the U.N., about seventy per cent of Gazans live on less than a dollar a day, and seventy-five per cent rely on international food assistance. [...]

[T]he tanks that line the border do lob shells into the territory, causing many random casualties. While I was there, a teen-age girl was killed, and her young brother injured, in such an incident. The Israelis maintain a buffer zone along the border about half a mile deep, which places at least thirty per cent of the Strip’s arable land off limits. [...]

The Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, warned that Gazans were “bringing upon themselves a greater Shoah, because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate.” [...]

That’s completely without getting into what happened during the attack and who was killed and why and how. This is a prison in which over 1.5 million people, the majority of whom are under the age of 18, are serving time.