The New York Times finally admits that Gaza is an outdoor prison

Photo source: Rob Pierson – CC BY 2.0

“Gazas are stuck in a prison decades in the making”

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

Gaza is a ‘large open-air prison’.

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

Fourteen years after British Prime Minister David Cameron accused the Israelis of creating a “vast open-air prison” in Gaza, the New York Times finally acknowledged that the Palestinians in Gaza are “effectively imprisoned… Egypt and Israel have become a killing zone.” On 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 on several previous occasions, but the past year has “seen an unprecedented scale of destruction,” according to the United Nations

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

The mainstream media has been very slow to recognize the Israeli-Egyptian cooperation that has imprisoned Gaza since Hamas’s 2005 election victory, which supported Hamas for opposing Israel and providing welfare, schools and daycare centers to the area’s impoverished residents . Hamas won 75 of the 118 seats, leaving Fatah with 39.

More than two million Palestinians have been in this lockdown for the past seventeen years. Since 2007, Israel has banned Palestinians from leaving through Erez, the passenger crossing from Gaza to Israel; Via Erez they can reach the West Bank and travel abroad via Jordan. Palestinians are not allowed to operate any airport or seaport in Gaza, and Israeli authorities impose strict restrictions on 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 move to 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 that these restrictions are related to maintaining security, there is ample evidence that the main motivation is to limit Palestinian demography in the West Bank, whose land Israel wants to retain, unlike the Gaza Strip.

Egypt is no better than Israel when it comes to the humiliation of Palestinians trying to leave Gaza for legitimate medical reasons. The parents of a 7-year-old boy with autism and a rare brain disease said they wanted to travel for medical treatment for him in August 2021; Egyptian authorities only allowed the boy and his mother inside. The mother said their journey back to Gaza took four days, mainly due to the closure of Rafah. During this time, she said, they waited for hours at checkpoints, in extreme heat, while her son cried nonstop. She said she felt “humiliated” and treated like “an animal,” noting that she would “rather die than travel through Rafah again.”

The occupation laws allow the occupying powers to impose security restrictions on civilians, but also require them to restore public life to the occupied population, which Israel has never done and which the international community has ignored. A prolonged occupation, such as that of Gaza, requires the occupier to develop narrowly tailored responses to security threats; these should keep restrictions on rights to a minimum. Israel has never done that, and the mainstream media has never paid any attention to the debilitating effect of Israel’s unwillingness to respect the human rights of Palestinians.

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

Over the past 17 years, Israel has restricted electricity use in Gaza, forced sewage to be dumped into the sea, kept the water undrinkable, and suffered fuel shortages that have halted sanitation services. Netanyahu’s actions ensure the continuation 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 solution. Is there a comparison here with the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943?

No one can ever justify the brutality of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, but the brutal conditions Israel and Egypt imposed on the citizens of Gaza help explain the motivations for that invasion. There are two compelling factors that stand out in any examination of the Gaza crisis: the continued intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli unwillingness to pursue a diplomatic and political solution to the Palestinian tragedy. Like a long line of Israeli politicians, Netanyahu is in favor of total humiliation of the Palestinian people. The Hamas invasion of October 7 was inevitable.