Gaza poverty mounts despite Hamas-Israel truce

UN official John Ging, operation director of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), says, "The situation in the Gaza Strip continues to deteriorate and the number of poor people continues to increase one month after a truce has been reached”.

Following a truce brokered by Egypt between Israel and Gaza militant groups, which took effect on June 19, Israel has slightly eased the blockade imposed on the strip and allowed more amounts of food, fuels and raw materials into Gaza.

Ging announced that his international relief organization decided to offer 6.5 million U.S. dollars as an urgent aid to around 100,000 poor Gaza residents registered at UNRWA.

[Xinhua]

The Silent Violence of Gaza's Suffering

The world’s largest prison—Gaza prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of them starving, sick and penniless.

The humanitarian crisis brought about by Israeli government blockades that prevent food, medicine, fuel and other necessities from coming into this tiny enclave through international relief organizations.

The Israeli government is barring most of the trucks from entering Gaza to feed the nearly one million Palestinians depending on international relief, from groups such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The loss of life from crumbling health care facilities, disastrous electricity cutoffs, gross malnutrition and contaminated drinking water from broken public water systems does not get totaled.

These are the children and their civilian adult relatives who expire in a silent violence of suffering that 98 percent of Congress avoids mentioning while extending billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel annually. UNRWA says “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing.” Cancer patients are deprived of their chemotherapy, kidney patients are cut off from dialysis treatments and premature babies cannot receive blood-clotting medications.

The misery, mortality and morbidity worsens day by day. Here is how the commissioner-general of UNRWA sums it up, “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would say-encouragement of the international community.”

[Excerpt of an article by Ralph Nader]