Quiet once again reigns after two weeks of unchecked inundation into Rafah by an estimated 700,000 of the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. The 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip have been living in a largest prison-like territory in the world. Gaza is a cage and it depends almost totally on Israel's mercy for electricity and fuel. Its dependence is the result of 38 years of Israel's direct control over the Strip. Israeli government not only restricted movement in and out of Gaza but also controlled passage through the border crossing. Since the 2006 Palestinian Legislative elections, Israel has sealed off all its crossings with Gaza.

Collective punishment
"Recent action violates the strict prohibition on collective punishment contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention," John Dugard, UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied territories, said in the statement put out by the UN Human Rights Commission. "It violates one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law that military action must distinguish between military and civilian targets."
Since Annapolis conference in November, 2007 to relaunch the Middle East peace process, "the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israelis has soared 100 percent. The ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed last year was the most unbalanced ever, at 40:1, up from 30:1 in 2006 and 4:1 from 2000-2005. The total death toll for 2007 stands at 322 Palestinians and eight Israelis. Of the eight, five were soldiers who died while carrying out military operations inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The pretext for these endless killings is the Qassam rockets. But the truth is that the daily incursions, assassinations, and embargo, have proceeded without fail before and after the rockets. The excuses change all the time, but the reality of occupation remains the same," said Soumaya Ghannoushi in her article in The Guardian, on 24 January 2008.

The Impact of Blockade

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released on 22 January, 2008, a pessimistic report summarizing the living conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2007. The report said that 49 percent of Palestinian households in the West Bank and 79 percent in the Gaza Strip live in poverty. 34 percent of Palestinians face "food insecurity" (which is defined as households with income and consumption of 1.6 dollars per day). OCHA added the water supply dropped last year to 75 liters per person a day in the Strip and to 80.5 liters in the West Bank, approximately half the international standard. Some 10,000 Palestinians who live in enclaves west of the West Bank fence are cut off from vital health and education services and from family and social networks.
On the depth of Gazans' misery, Soumaya Ghannoushi wrote in The Guardian, "The sanitation system is in a state of paralysis. Raw sewage is spilling out on to the streets, homes and fields, and in order to save fuel, the city has stopped collecting garbage — 400 metric tons a day. The siege has reduced 85 percent of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants to total dependency on food aid, the highest rate anywhere in the world. More than 95 percent of businesses and factories have been forced to close their doors (3,500), leading to the loss of more than 65,000 jobs. For Gazans, border closures mean starvation." (24 January 2008}
About the health situation, Ghannoushi wrote, "The health system is crippled, with rapidly declining medical supplies, generated by the blockage of international aid. Hospitals are out of funds. As of now, 107 types of basic medicines are depleted, 136 supplies, including syringes and tape are stopped at the border, and the number of patients permitted to leave for medical treatment has grounded almost to a halt, leading to tens of deaths. In this unfolding tragedy, borders and crossings have turned into instruments of collective punishment, Israel's way of crushing the Palestinians and bringing them to their knees."
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) warned of its having "a devastating impact." "Depriving people of such basics as water is tantamount to depriving them of human dignity," said UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness, "It is difficult to understand the logic of making hundreds of thousands of people suffer quite needlessly."
"There is a major risk of a total collapse of all the infrastructure," said Dorothea Krimitsas, spokeswoman for the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva. "The blockade measures have an enormous human cost and we have asked Israel to immediately lift all retaliatory measures," she said, "The population finds itself hostage to this conflict and is suffering the most serious consequences," with hospitals under particular strain given the lack of supplies and electricity, Krimitsas said.
The head of the UN children's agency UNICEF echoed her concerns. Executive Director Anne Veneman said, "We are very concerned about the situation of children in Gaza ... children are always the victims in times of conflict," Veneman told journalists at the launch of UNICEF's annual report on the state of the world's children.

PRC Meeting at the Houses of Commons
While opening a meeting on the "Analysis of the Situation in Gaza" organized by the Palestine Return Centre (PRC) at the House of Commons Committee Room on 24 January 2008, Dr. Daud Abdullah said, "There must be some measure of proportionalism; indiscriminate act on the part of the Israelis that has sent this disproportionate casualties to such a high number."
Neil Gerrard, MP, said, "There is a clear view about the total unacceptability of the collective punishment widely used in the past and certainly widely used now to punish every single person living in Gaza."
The chair of All Party Parliamentary Group on Palestine, Richard Burden, MP, said, "The siege of Gaza did not start in relation to rockets; certainly did not start too in relation to Hamas rockets. Restrictions in and out of Gaza predate the elections of Hamas government in 2006. It is true that they have been massively increased since 2006. But the stepping up of those movement restrictions in and out of Gaza; stepping up the blockade was principally and first a response not to rocket attacks; because at that time when the rocket was being fired Hamas itself was on ceasefire at that time."
Speaking on the boycott of the democratic election of Hamas as a Parliamentary majority, Burden said, "That unfortunately, that boycott was, I think, shamefully endorsed and supported by the international community, is totally counterproductive."
Burden said, "There cannot be a three state solution and there certainly cannot be a solution of two states and one prison just a few miles away."
Burden also maintained, "Reconciliation is the way forward. Our role is not to make the situation worse. The solution is the viable two states solution: viable Palestine along side Israel that will just only provide peace and security that Palestinian deserves and the security that Israelis deserve as well."
Lord Ahmed of Rotherham said, "I have been talking about this largest prison in the world because of the blockade and the difficulties that exist in terms of food and other necessities that are required for the people in Gaza."
Lord Ahmed told me in an interview, "The state of Israel very cleverly continues to divide the Palestinian people - the Fatah and the Hamas from Gaza to West Bank. I think, this is the time for the Palestinian people themselves as well as the people in the Middle East and the Muslim communities to help in bringing reconciliation between them and to bring them together so that there will be two states which is more viable; otherwise, three states will be very dangerous situation. Because that will not be viable and this is exactly what Israel is looking for."
Lord Ahmed was hopeful that lesson will be drawn from the "humanitarian crisis and the dire situation of war crimes that have been committed against the people of Gaza and also it is a lesson for the international community that we cannot continue to allow Israel to break the law of the United Nations because it has the support of the United States," said Lord Ahmed and added, "I think, this crisis warranted for the Security Council and the General Assembly to meet to express their not only deep concern but also the condemnation of the State of Israel."
Dr. Brian Iddon, MP, said, "The international law does allow people who are under occupation to resist the occupation; we seem to have lost sight of that. I am not condoning the rocket attacks. And I am not condoning the one side of the argument or the other side of the argument. What we have here is a prison now in Gaza; inside that prison are people; they are children and elderly people too."
"The situation is humanitarian crisis. We had similar situation before", said Dr. Iddon and mentioned, "Berlin was a prison when the Russian {blockaded it); we did not sit back; we airlifted fuel, we airlifted food into Berlin."
"Israel has broken every international law," said Dr. Iddon and enquired, "What the British government is going to do about that. What the other international governments do about it. And why Israel breaks so many international laws, more than any other countries in my life time."
Dr. Iddon said, "I cannot understand why the international community the United Nations the British government and especially the American government are not trying to do something more than they are doing at the moment to solve the severe humanitarian crisis."

Media Response
The Economist of 26th January 2008 wrote, "The shortages in Gaza have grown gradually worse since Israel, having declared Gaza a "hostile entity". "Israel's collective punishment of the 1.4m Gazans, and its missile attacks on militants that often kill some civilians too (65 Gazans died in the first three weeks of January), merely draw ever louder condemnation at home and abroad," maintained The Economist and observed, "the more Gaza suffers, the harder it is for Mr. Abbas to continue those talks. And if a Qassam hits a busy Israeli school playground. Israel's politicians may feel obliged to hit back so hard that they destroy the peace process for good. Israel and Western policy has been to try to ignore Gaza, but Gaza is showing ever more clearly that it cannot be ignored."
The Guardian editorially observed on 24 January, 2008, "If you bottle up 1.5 million people in a territory 25 miles long and six miles wide, and turn off the lights, as Israel has done in Gaza, the bottle will burst. This is what happened yesterday when tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt to buy food, fuel and supplies after militants destroyed two-thirds of the wall separating the Gaza Strip from Egypt. It was the biggest jail break in history."
Financial Times in its second editorial under the caption "Gaza's misery" wrote on 25 January 2008, "The tens of thousands of Palestinian who burst out of Gaza into Egypt this week in search of food, fuel and medicine have temporarily broken the siege that had tightened like a noose around this teeming territory ever since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip last June."
The editorial observed, "Last weekend Gaza's power went off after Israel suspended fuel supplies. This siege is not only wrong, it is almost wholly counterproductive. First, Israel's tactic of "collective punishment" is illegal. Targeting a civilian population is prohibited by international law: there is no debate to be had about it. Second, however, two decades of using this tactic, in the occupied territories and in Lebanon, should have taught Israel that it does not work. It actually strengthens organizations such as Hamas and Hizbollah. Indeed, this siege is visibly increasing Gazans' dependence on Hamas as the only source of the means of subsistence."
The editorial suggested, "Arab and international mediators should immediately seek an armistice from Hamas and an end to the Gaza blockade from Israel."

Saudi Peace Plan
Though Arab countries always show their disunity this is the only issue where they came to an agreement and accepted the Peace Initiative of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia first adopted in 2002. That Saudi Peace Plan is still on the table and Israel has yet to accept that.
Prince Turki aI-Faisal, a former ambassador to the United States and Britain and adviser to King Abdullah, has offered Israel a vision of broad cooperation with the Arab world and people-to-people contacts if it signs a peace treaty and withdraws from all occupied Arab territories. Prince al-Faisal said, in an interview with Paul Taylor, reported in The International Tribune, on 21 January 2008, “The Arab world, by the Arab peace initiative, has crossed the Rubicon from hostility toward Israel to peace with Israel and has extended the hand of peace to Israel, and we await the Israelis picking up our hand and joining us in what inevitably will be beneficial for Israel and for the Arab world."
Prince al-Faisal said that if Israel accepted the Arab League plan and signed a comprehensive peace, "one can imagine the integration of Israel into the Arab geographical entity." "One can imagine not just economic, political and diplomatic relations between Arabs and Israelis but also issues of education, scientific research, combating mutual threats to the inhabitants of this vast geographic area," he said.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, brother of the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, presently heads the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. His comments came on the sidelines of a conference on the Middle East and Europe staged by the Bertelsmann Founda­tion. Writing from Kronberg, Germany, in the In­ternational Herald Tribune, Paul Taylor also quoted Prince Turki al-Faisal who said, "We will start thinking of Israelis as Arab Jews rather than sim­ply as Israelis," he said.
Taylor also wrote, An Israeli participant at the conference, Yossi Alpher, co-editor of the Bitter Lemons Israeli-Palestinian Web site and a former senior intelligence official, welcomed the comments. I was delighted to hear Prince Turki's description of the comprehensive nature of normalization as he envisages it within the framework of the Arab peace initiative," Alpher said.
"His remarks should encourage us Israelis and Arabs to deepen and broaden the discussion of ways to reach a comprehensive peace, implement the Arab peace initiative and reach the kind of cooperation that his highness described." Alpher said, reported by Taylor.

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