The Untold Gaza Story: I. The Impact on Children and Youth

By Geoffrey Cook, TMO

Sacramento–Your author has just read about the overwhelming reaction to the horrible violence against innocents in Newton Connecticut a few weeks ago, but, at the same time, the American press has ignored the mega-murders against children in Muslim lands for which the American governmental policy is directly responsible.  Washington is not precisely liable for the strategy of the purposeful targeting of children in the most recent Israeli Gaza assault, but the District of Columbia (D.C.) is the enabler of the instigator, the IDF (Israel Defense Force).

The properly attired Muslim woman, Laila El-Haded, a reporter resident of the Strip and writer of Gaza Mom, who is in actuality a mother of one son, too, and lives in Gaza City spoke at a venue in this California capital city here sponsored by the Palestinian-buttressing non-profit org, Sabel North America.

The situation in Gaza has improved a small bit with the Islamist assertion in their neighbor nation, the Arab Republic of Egypt, by the Islamist the ascendance there of the now ruling party — the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing — the Freedom and Justice Party.  The Brotherhood in the past “mentored” the current dominant Palestinian Strip’s Hamas party, and there is a still a great popular support for their Palestinian Arab “siblings” upon their western border.

With a third of the mini-nation’s population under the age of eighteen, Gaza still is isolated, but with the Israeli “public relations” debacle by their most recent incursion and with the support of their Egyptian Brothers they are internationally less so now.

The vicious blockade, almost since its 2005 inception, has made it hard to access food and other basic substances.  In fact, a recent study showed the average citizen of Gaza suffers from malnutrition which in turn encourages hoarding and corruption by the “haves.”  Before the opening of the southern land crossing by the Egyptian armed forces, the secret tunnels created a noveau rich. This put a concentration of capital in a few hands, which only left the great majority of the residents worse off, and helps explain the accusation of corruption within the two Palestinian entities.  Hopefully, with the continued access to the Egyptian-controlled Rafah land crossing into the sub-State along with the concessions Tel Aviv was forced to make will ease the Blockade and withdraw from the military action in the future for which it has had little external or internal approval. 

Gaza City, this ancient capital of the (former) Philistines, who were a non-Semitic Indo-European-speaking group, is one of the oldest continuously populated cities in the world.

For much of its contemporary existence as a semi-autonomous Palestinian entity, the sea-lanes have been blocked, also, and this has destroyed much of their indigenous means for the production of protein (fishing) by enforcing a three mile sea zone from their littoral boundary.  Ocean fish farming has essentially been blocked, too; destroying yet another traditional enterprise.

Further, two-thirds of the Palestinian farmland in the Strip has been taken out of cultivation due to the siphoning of their aquifer by the surrounding Kibbutzes and the squeezing of the stable of their agricultural export — high-grade olive oil — by the destruction of their trees by the IDF in their punishing incursions.  Olive and date trees are primary to the agronomy of the region because they can thrive within the Gazan hinterlands.  Succinctly, organic sustainable agriculture has been devastated due to the blockade and the external criminality which is obfuscated under Israel’s disguise through their attempt to cordon off their neighbors from the world.

The blockage is less about food then the denizen’s freedom of movement!  The continuation of confinement has made the Gaza Strip one of the most populated claustrophobic prisons in the world!
The result has been “No development; no [secure] property, and no access to humanitarian aid.”

The barricade has hit the youth the hardest.  It has been impossible to travel.  Further, a ban on book importation into the terrain has been instituted by the oppressors.  Physically, this Mediterranean territory is short two hundred and fifty schools due to the enemy’s ban on building materials.  Governmental and non-governmental agencies have been innovative in deploying the scattered rubble into redevelopment of infrastructure although the issue of toxins has been forced to be ignored.

After (the IDF’s) Operation Cast Lead of three years ago, 95%of this miniscule country’s manufacturing infrastructure was decimated. 

Coping metrologies of resistance have been especially employing the Blogosphere and social media even before The Arab “Spring” (revolts discovered them as a means of resistance) We shall be going further into Ms. El- Hadad’s testimony on her homeland in the near future.

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