The New York Times finally admits that Gaza is an open-air prison

Photo source: Rob Pierson – CC BY 2.0

“Gaza residents are locked in a prison that has lasted decades”

– Mark Landler, New York Times, October 8, 2024.

Gaza is a “great open-air prison”.

– British Prime Minister David Cameron, July 28, 2010.

Fourteen years after British Prime Minister David Cameron accused Israel of creating a “large open-air prison” in Gaza, the New York Times finally admitted that Palestinians in Gaza had been “effectively imprisoned…in a strip of land 141 square miles between Egypt and Israel have become a deadly zone. The same day, the Washington Post finally acknowledged that it would take “80 years to rebuild all the destroyed homes in Gaza” if the pace of construction “reflects previous conflicts.” Israel has bombed Gaza several times before, but last year was marked by “an unprecedented scale of destruction”, according to the United Nations.

A UN satellite assessment found that Israeli bombings and airstrikes have “damaged more than 65 percent of structures in Gaza, including 230,000 homes.” The World Health Organization estimates that at least 10,000 bodies are buried beneath these buildings. Clearing the rubble and accessing these bodies will be particularly difficult because around 70 percent of Gaza’s road network has been damaged. Toxic dust and debris from Israeli bombings over the years have caused long-term health problems, according to Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Toxic byproducts of the current war are likely to pollute Gaza’s already limited water supply, according to the Washington Post, and will undoubtedly cause many more serious health problems.

The mainstream media has been very slow to recognize the Israeli-Egyptian collaboration that has imprisoned Gaza since Hamas’s 2005 electoral victory, supporting Hamas for opposing Israel and providing social assistance, schools and daycare. to poor residents of the territory. Hamas won 75 seats out of 118, leaving Fatah with 39.

More than two million Palestinians have been confined for 17 years. Since 2007, Israel has barred Palestinians from leaving Erez, the passenger crossing from Gaza to Israel; it is via Erez that they can reach the West Bank and travel abroad via Jordan. Palestinians are not allowed to operate an airport or seaport in Gaza, and Israeli authorities heavily restrict the entry and exit of goods. As a result, rebuilding Gaza will take decades, if it is even possible to create a post-war Gaza.

Israel has also made it impossible for Palestinians from Gaza to be resettled in the West Bank. Due to Israeli restrictions, thousands of Gaza residents who arrived on temporary permits and now live in the West Bank cannot obtain legal residency. Although Israel claims these restrictions are related to maintaining security, there is ample evidence that the primary motivation is to limit Palestinian demographics in the West Bank, whose land Israel seeks to retain, unlike the Gaza Strip.

Egypt is no better than Israel when it comes to humiliating Palestinians who try to leave Gaza for legitimate medical reasons. Parents of 7-year-old boy with autism and rare brain disease say they sought travel for medical treatment for him in August 2021; Egyptian authorities only allowed entry to the boy and his mother. The mother said their journey back to Gaza took four days, mainly because of the closure of Rafah. During that time, she said, they spent hours waiting at checkpoints, in extreme heat, with her son crying constantly. She said she felt “humiliated” and treated like “an animal”, observing that she “would rather die than cross Rafah again”.

The laws of occupation allow occupying powers to impose security restrictions on civilians, but they also require them to restore public life to the occupied population, something Israel has never done and the international community has ignored. A prolonged occupation, such as that of Gaza, requires the occupier to craft narrowly tailored responses to security threats; these must minimize restrictions on rights. Israel has never done so, and the mainstream media has never paid attention to the debilitating effect of Israel’s refusal to respect Palestinian human rights.

For years, Human Rights Watch has documented cases of Palestinians from Gaza being denied permission to travel to the West Bank or East Jerusalem for professional and educational opportunities. In 2019, a Gaza soccer team planned a match in the West Bank with a rival in a match that would determine the Palestinian representative at the Asian Cup. The Gaza team applied for permits for the entire 22-person team and 13 staff members, but Israel only granted permits to four people, only one of whom was a player.

Over the past 17 years, Israel has limited the use of electricity in Gaza, forces the dumping of sewage into the sea, ensures that water remains undrinkable, and suffers fuel shortages that shut down sanitation plans. Netanyahu’s actions ensure the perpetuation of despair among those forced to live in these conditions. Such desperation would lead any human being to believe that violent resistance is the only recourse. Is there a comparison here with the Warsaw ghetto in 1943?

No one will ever be able to justify the brutality of Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, but the brutal conditions that Israel and Egypt imposed on Gaza’s citizens help explain the motivations for the invasion. Two defining factors emerge from any examination of the crisis in Gaza: the continued intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli reluctance to seek a diplomatic and political solution to the Palestinian tragedy. Like a long line of Israeli politicians, Netanyahu favors the total humiliation of the Palestinian people. The Hamas invasion on October 7 was inevitable.