June 14th was the 15th anniversary of the blockade Israel imposed on the Gaza Strip and has maintained with the cooperation of Egypt and acquiescence of the international community. To mark the day, Human Right Watch issued a new report, Gaza: Israel’s ‘Open-Air Prison’ at 15: Israel, Egypt Movement Restrictions Wreak Havoc on Palestinian Lives.
The Human Rights Watch report states that “the closure has devastated the economy in Gaza, contributed to fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and forms part of Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians.
Imagine what it is like to spend your entire live confined to a small spit of land, just 25 miles long and 5 – 7 miles wide, surrounded by walls, fences and watch towers, with Israeli snipers firing at farmers if they venture within 300 meters of the perimeter fence, and the Israeli navy firing at fishing boats if they venture beyond three nautical miles from shore, and with the whine of surveillance drones overhead day and night.
Imagine being trapped in a society where nearly 50 percent are unemployed, while Israel exerts tight control over all movement of goods and people, including those seeking to leave the Gaza Strip for medical care, and from time to time engages in deadly “mowing the grass” military operations and then refuses to permit the entry of the material necessary to repair the vital infrastructure, housing, clinics and schools that have been destroyed by its advanced weapons, many of them US-supplied.
There is the anguish of the extinguished lives: according to Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, during the 15 years of the closure, Israel’s military attacks have killed 5,418 Palestinians, nearly a quarter of them children.
Add to this the mental health harm inflicted on children and the entire civilian population that has had to endure four massive military strikes during these 15 years, as well as the deaths, permanent injuries and trauma inflicted during the 2018-2019 Great March of Return on an unarmed civilian population, some 70 percent of whom are refugees.
Gaza’s crumbling medical care system is also forced to deal with public health consequences caused by a water crisis that has been decades in the making and which led the UN in 2012 to question whether the Gaza Strip would be ‘liveable’ in 2020: its sole aquifer is now on the verge of irreversible collapse, and 97% of its water is unfit to drink.
In Gaza, wrote the outgoing UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk in his report on Israel’s creation of an apartheid reality, two million people are being subjected to “a method of population control unique in the modern world.”
It is shameful that the international community has turned a blind eye to what has become a ‘forever blockade’ and enabled a cruel form of collective punishment to stunt the lives of millions of Gazans, the majority of them children.
Whether it is called ‘incremental genocide’ or something else, Israel’s suffocating 15-year-long closure must be brought to an end – let Gaza live!
Nancy Murray
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
A child’s drawing created during treatment at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program