Last week, a UN commission held hearings in Gaza, listening for two days as residents described their experience during the Israeli attack six months ago.  The stories are horrific – but so are current conditions. As Peter Beaumont reports in the Guardian of his most recent trip to Gaza:

There are changes that I do register in the six months since the war ended. The bodies of dead animals have been removed and cleared away; the ruins have been sifted for human remains. It has expunged the odour of decay that was once tangy with the chemical flavour of explosives and spent phosphorous. The tangled remnants of an orange grove I drove past every day, tipped over and torn by military bull-dozers, has disappeared, razed for firewood.

And without concrete and steel, aluminium and glass, without tiles for roofs and cladding for stairs and bathrooms – all prevented from entering Gaza by Israel’s continuing economic blockade – no rebuilding has begun. For those who suffered most, the war continues.

Beaumont’s article goes on to update the conditions of several families he first visited right after the January cease-fire and each of them will break your heart.

Not only are Gazans still left with no way to rebuild, no way to recover from the attack, but they continue to die from Israeli attacks. On Thursday, a 17 year old Gazan girl, Hyam Ayash, was killed and  “three other people were wounded when the shell struck near a house in al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.” 

As  Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative said during his testimony to the UN delegation:

They [the UN and international community] must deal with Israel the same as they did with the apartheid regime in South Africa. If they don’t, Israel will only increase its crimes and aggression against the children of the Palestinian people.

Instead of sanctions however, the US has invited Israeli Air Force pilots to “take part later this month in a training exercise with the U.S. Air Force at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.”  Along with US pilots, the IAF will practice dogfights and in-air refueling. (you may well ask precisely what mission the IAF believes it is preparing for?)

And all that money pledged months ago with so much fanfair by our new administration to help the people of Gaza? Gideon Levy gives us the update in Haaretz:

The $2 billion promised with much ceremony at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit about six months ago – of it $900 million from the new America under President Barack Obama – is lying in vaults at the international banks. A senior American diplomat explained a few days ago that his country is not transferring the money "because Israel is objecting," and an American law prohibits trading with Hamas. He said this in utter seriousness, as if there were no American commitment to transfer the money, and as if the great America were dependent on Israel.

For the people of Gaza, some things do change – they just keep getting worse.


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