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Gaza Since Disengagement

By Henry Norr, December 2006

Back in August, 2005, when Israel was pulling its 8,000 Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians and outside observers were divided about just what the move would mean for the 1.4 million Gazans who would remain.

Some, looking on the bright side, hoped for at least modest improvements, such as increased freedom of movement for Gazans and perhaps some revival in the area’s long-suffering economy. Other observers, focusing on Israel’ insistence on maintaining tight control of Gaza’s borders, air space, and territorial waters, argued that the withdrawal of the settlers would bring no real change.

Hardly anyone, however, seems to have predicted that the 15 months following the withdrawal of the last Israeli settlers and soldiers would produce nothing but a massive increase in death, destruction, and deprivation.

ACCESS AND MOVEMENT
The Israeli pullback did bring one indisputable benefit: the dismantling of internal checkpoints that had for years strangled life within the Gaza Strip. But hopes of easier access to the West Bank and the wider world, codified in an agreement concluded between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November, 2005, proved to be only a short-lived illusion. Under pressure from the Americans, Israel promised a long list of concessions: it would allow regular bus and truck convoys between Gaza and the West Bank; permit the export of all Gazan agricultural produce, open the Rafah border crossing to Egypt (under European Union supervision for a year, then under Palestinian control), allow construction of a new seaport, and so on.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the deal would “give the Palestinian people freedom to move, to trade, to live ordinary lives.”

Twelve months later, on Nov. 30, 2006, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs issued a report on compliance with the agreement one year on. Its conclusion: Israel was out of compliance with all six major provisions of the deal:

The promised bus and truck convoys between the two Palestinian territories have not been allowed, and “the movement of people between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank remains virtually impossible,” according to the U.N. Israel has closed the Karni crossing, the main outlet from the Strip for commercial traffic, more than half the days this year. On average a paltry 12 trucks per day have been allowed through, compared to an agreed target of 400 per day by the end of 2006. Less than 4 percent of Gaza’s 2005 agricultural harvest was exported.

The Rafah Crossing was opened regularly during the first few months of the agreement, but since Palestinian resistance fighters captured an Israeli soldier on June 25, 2006, Israel has allowed EU monitors to open the crossing only occasionally (one day in seven on average) and unpredictably, often forcing would-be travelers to wait days for a chance to enter or leave the Strip. Israel has not allowed construction of the new seaport to begin, nor kept its promise to continue discussions about reconstruction of the Gaza airport it destroyed.

ECONOMY AND LIVING CONDITIONS
Under these pressures, the Gazan economy—already suffering from more than a decade of what economists call “de-development”—has continued to contract.

Israeli and Western responses to the elections of Jan. 25, 2006, when the Palestinians gave a clear majority in their legislative council to the Hamas movement, have exacerbated the problem: Israel stopped handing over the tax payments it collects for the Palestinians, which normally constitute about half the PA’s budget, while the U.S. and European Union acceded to Israeli demands that they cut off most aid to the Palestinians.

These factors have combined to turn Gaza into a humanitarian disaster area: Some 80 percent of the population lives on less than$2 a day. Three-quarters of the population depends on U.N. food aid for survival. About 70 percent of Gaza’s potential workforce isout of work or working without pay. For most of the population electricity is available only irregularly (typically six to eight hours per day). Because electricity is required to pump water, most residents have no running water most of the day.

MILITARY ACTIVITY
Israeli settlers were scarcely out of the Gaza Strip when the Israeli military unleashed a devastating new tactic intended to intimidate the Palestinian population: creating devastating sonic booms by breaking the sound barrier with supersonic jets flying at low altitude, typically at night, sometimes as frequently as an hour apart. The resulting shockwaves break windows by the thousands, crack buildings, induce miscarriages, exhaust everyone, and especially traumatize children, according medical authorities.

IOF destruction of olive orchards in Beit Hanoun

Photo: Palestinian Red Crescent Society

Gazans also continued to face more immediately lethal assaults. Within days of with-drawing the last of the military forces it had stationed in Gaza, Israel began a new wave of attacks inside the Strip, ostensibly in retaliation for the continued launching of homemade projectiles by Palestinian resistance fighters. These assaults included artillery fire from land and sea, air strikes, and “targeted assassinations” of alleged militants - and whoever happened to be near them.

2006 brought rising tension and increasingly frequent clashes between supporters of the two leading Palestinian political movements, Fatah and Hamas, but no letup in Israeli attacks. The violence reached an emotional crescendo on June 9-10, when Israel killed fourteen Palestinians and injured thirty-six others, including thirteen children. The death toll included seven members of the Ghaliya family, who had been enjoying a day at the beach; only seven-year-old Huda survived. At that point many thought the situation in Gaza couldn’t get much worse; unfortunately, that view soon proved shortsighted. In late June, in response to the capture of its soldier, Israel launched a massive offensive, code-named “Operation Summer Rain,” throughout the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of civilians were arrested, including 10 ministers and 31 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Among the buildings destroyed were the Palestinian Ministries of the Interior, Foreign Affairs, and the National Economy; the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister; and, most disastrously, Gaza’s only power-generating plant, which had produced 43 percent of the electricity consumed in the Strip.

While world attention shifted to the war in Lebanon, Israel continued its offensive in Gaza through the summer and into the fall of 2006. The culmination came in early November, when Israeli forces, citing the firing of Qassam projectiles into nearby Israeli towns, attacked the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip with 70 tanks, F-16s, helicopter gunships, and armored bulldozers. A young resident of the town gave a vivid description of conditions during the attack: “No one can leave. No one can flee. … We have no water, no electricity. We hide in the remote corners of our houses. Ambulances are not authorized to enter into this occupied and closed zone. The soldiers … shoot anyone that moves.”

Over eight days Israeli forces killed 82 Palestinians and injured more than 260 in and around Beit Hanoun. At least 39 of the dead were civilians, including 18 children and ten women. One IDF soldier was killed and another wounded. The worst tragedy came on Nov. 8, when a barrage of Israeli tank shells rained down on a group of homes in the town, killing 20, including eight children and seven women, and wounding at least 40; 13 of the dead, including two women and six children, belonged to one family, the Athamnas.

The November offensive pushed the toll from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since the completion ofdisengagement in September 2005 to approximately 525 Palestinians killedand 1,527 injured. More than 15,000artillery shells were fired and 550 airstrikes carried out. During the sameperiod Palestinians fired approximately 1,700 projectiles into Israel, killing one and injuring about 45.

One bright spot in the Beit Hanounsaga was a courageous and creative act of non-violent resistance by about 200 local women, who surrounded a mosque in which about 60 men fromthe town had taken refuge and helpedthem escape - even after the Israelis opened fire on the women, killing two of them. A few weeks later hundreds of Palestinians in the nearby Jabaliya refugee camp also used non violence to prevent a planned Israeli air attack on one of the homes in the camp: they massed around and on the roof of the targeted home, until the Israelis called off the attack.

At this writing a ceasefire has been in effect in Gaza for just over a week. For the sake of the people of Gaza, we can only hope that it lasts. But what the horrifying history of the Strip since disengagement shows, once again, is that there are no shortcuts to peace - a lasting peace can be established only on the basis of a negotiated settlement that finally provides justice for the Palestinian people.

Henry Norr has spent six months in Palestine in recent years, starting with a visit to the Gaza Strip under ISM auspices in May, 2002.