Following a number of investigations and reports into Israel’s barbaric 22-day onslaught on Gaza that ended on 18 January 2009, the UN published its own damning official report on 15 September. The report states that Israel ‘committed actions amounting to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity’ in Gaza and that Israel’s operations ‘were carefully planned in all their phases as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population’. Israel’s military operation ‘was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole’. It found that, contrary to Israeli denials, white phosphorus shells had been fired at a UN compound in Gaza. Bob Shepherd reports.
Gazan reconstruction ‘impossible’
The UN investigation, led by Justice Richard Goldstone, accused Israel of imposing a blockade on Gaza ‘amounting to collective punishment’ carried out as part of a ‘systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation of the Gaza Strip’ in the run up to the onslaught. This Israeli policy, supported by Britain and the US, continues to this day, so that eight months after the end of the onslaught the UN report states that ‘families are still living amid the rubble of their former homes after the attacks ended, as reconstruction has been impossible due to the continuing blockade’.
While being forced to concentrate on Israel’s ‘serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law’ by the fact that Israel’s war machine killed over 1,400 Palestinians, including approximately 400 children, the report also inevitably attempts to equate Palestinian resistance with the Israeli occupation and onslaught. It condemns the Palestinian resistance in Gaza for firing rockets into Israel. Ezzet Al Resheq, a political leader of Hamas in Gaza, welcomed the report but condemned the equation of the actions of the occupied and the occupier. He said that if the UN was condemning the firing of rockets into non-military areas, then ‘we tell them to give us advanced weapons that could be guided, and we will guarantee that only military targets will be targeted’!
The report concludes that both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities in Gaza should investigate the allegations of war crimes and report to the UN Security Council within six months. If this does not happen, then the Security Council should refer the situation in Gaza to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, it is clear that the US and Britain would use their vetoes on the Security Council in favour of Israel and to prevent any possible trial. They would of course have no such scruples for members of the Hamas administration in Gaza.
Plight of Gazans remains desperate
The continuing desperate situation for the people of Gaza was spelled out in the Ramadan appeal for funds put out in August by the UN Relief and Works Agency. Its press release states:
‘Seven months after the Israeli Operation Cast Lead and three years into a stifling siege, life for the one million refugees in Gaza – 70% of the population – is characterised by chronic unemployment, infrequent access to power and water, health hazards stemming from inadequate sewage system, and sub-standard housing with thousands living in tents or the rubble of their former homes, dispossessed of all earthly belongings.’
No reconstruction has taken place. Of the billions pledged for reconstruction, nothing has reached Gaza. The ban placed by the Israelis on the entry of construction materials for all but a tiny fraction of needs has blocked any large scale reconstruction, and severely hampered even modest repairs to housing, schools, factories and roads. Only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars raised in public campaigns during the war has reached the refugees.
Gazan water supplies critical
The day before the UN report into Israeli war crimes was published, another UN department, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), issued its own report on the impending collapse of underground water supplies in Gaza. The underground aquifer is the sole water source for Gaza’s population of approximately 1.5 million people, but only 5-10% of the water is considered fit for human consumption. Due to a number of reasons which include the deliberate destruction of the system by Israeli military action, regional drought and over-extraction brought about in part by Israel drawing water, the aquifer has become contaminated by seawater, sewage and toxin-contaminated agricultural overflow. This is inevitably affecting the health of people, particularly the young and the sick; Munther Shoblak, from Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, says ‘we have noticed an increase in people suffering from kidney diseases from water contaminated with toxins, as well as babies born with an unnatural blue tinge’.
The UNEP report states ‘Gaza’s underground water system is in danger of collapse after recent conflict compounded by years of overuse and contamination’. During Israel’s onslaught on Gaza it is estimated that about $6m worth of damage was caused to major water and sanitation infrastructure that was already in a serious state of disrepair due to the siege. Over 30km of water networks were damaged or destroyed by the Israeli military, in addition to 11 wells operated by the water authorities. More than 6,000 roof tanks and 840 household connections were also damaged. There is an urgent need for cement, pipes, pumps, transformers and electrical spare parts to repair and replace the water and sewage systems. Some 1,250 tons of cement are currently needed for the repair of water storage tanks alone but Israel’s blockade continues to prevent cement from being brought into Gaza.
UNEP estimates that more than $1.5bn may be needed over 20 years to restore the aquifer back to health: ‘unless the degradation trend is reversed now, damage could take centuries to reverse’.
West Bank
During September George Mitchell, the US envoy to the Middle East, made a number of visits to Israel in an unsuccessful attempt to get the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to agree to a freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank. This is seen as a pre-condition to restarting the peace negotiations between Abbas and Netanyahu which the imperialists would like to see back on track. Abbas, though, needs some gesture from Israel to allow him to resume talks; the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank is undermining all the arguments being put forward by Abbas and his Fatah allies in favour of peace negotiations and the eventual formation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The last round of talks between Mitchell and the Israeli Defence Minister Barak on stopping settlement construction in July (see FRFI 209) had seen Barak agree to demolish 23 so-called illegal outposts in the West Bank. Unsurprisingly, not one of them had been demolished by the time these new discussions started. At the beginning of September Netanyahu and Barak authorised the construction of 455 new housing units in settlements across the West Bank including what is in reality a new settlement, Maskiyot, in the Jordan Valley. This followed on from their decision to go ahead with the completion of 2,500 units already under construction. Netanyahu refused to agree to any freeze. The most he would consider was a temporary freeze for six months which would not include the units under construction or approved, or any building activity in East Jerusalem. By the time Abbas and Netanyahu met US President Obama on 22 September, it was evident that the imperialists were no further forward in forcing through a deal.
Isolate Israel
Following the Zionists’ murderous assault on Gaza, the international campaign to isolate Israel has taken some steps forward:
• In Brazil the Parliamentary Commission on Foreign Relations and National Defence has recommended that parliament should not ratify the Free Trade Agreement between Mercosur and Israel until ‘Israel accepts the creation of the Palestinian state on the 1967 borders’.
• In Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival film makers, actors and academics condemned the Festival for showcasing Tel Aviv in its city-to-city spotlight.
• In Britain the TUC, although equating the armed resistance of the Palestinian people with the barbarism of the Israeli occupation and then condemning both, voted to support a boycott of goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and called for an end to all arms trade with Israel.
What the TUC decision amounts to, given its complete inability to organise a struggle against the Labour government, will be very little. FRFI therefore urges its readers to join it in building a real movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people that calls for the complete isolation of the racist Israeli state and a boycott of all Israeli goods – see page 14 for details of Marks and Spencer pickets in London and elsewhere.
FRFI 211 October / November 2009
