Gaza re-occupied

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Thanks to Gideon Levy from Haaretz for bringing this out in the open:

Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately.

Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn't even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing is left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about "the end of the occupation" and "partitioning the land" now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied.

Ilan Pappe has harsher words:

A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

The Israeli leadership is at lost of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes that the West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its eastern side. Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes the parts it covets – half of the West Bank – and cleanses it of its native population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an arrangement can not work in the Gaza enclave – Egypt unlike Jordan has succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt. So a million and half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel – although geographically the Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its midst.

The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967.

Revisiting Mohammed from Rafah, this is what he has to say:

I have not slept yet. The Israeli attack on the Eastern part of Gaza is ongoing, and the world is, as usual silent. Israel public opinion is falling and international community is no longer moving from its murderous silence. To whom should we complain? The Palestinian Authority? They are already broken and have no control. The USA? They are no longer interested in stability in the region. The EU or the Security Council? That is, of course, none of their business, since they have other things to care about.

In the past few days tens of people were killed and the number is increasing even as I type this text. This is the result of ongoing Israeli attacks. Schools have started and the children have no new uniforms or school bags; even the teachers have not been paid for the last six months. " I don’t know how I'm going to manage without a salary, where should I go and how should I feed my family?" asked the school teacher Majdi Salem, 29. He is a new teacher working for a governmental school, together with other 170,000 other employees, doctors, teachers and other security members. There are simply no salaries. Ismail Haneya, the Palestinian Prime Minister went to visit schools today.