Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan

Canadians are flabbergasted by the bizarre situation in the Middle East. A helpless, starving people are refusing to yield to a country that has nuclear weapons and is armed to the teeth, courtesy of the United States, and which is using its lethal weaponry against a defenseless people, raining missiles and bombs on civilians and buildings.



So does not Hamas care for the Palestinians who are being killed and wounded and for the infrastructure that is being devastated? Or have the Hamas leaders gone mad and do not see that mounting rocket attacks against civilians is not only criminal but also self-defeating —the rockets have not killed a single Israeli while Israeli attacks on Gazans are causing wholesale deaths, injuries and destruction?



Social media and commentators are explaining why Gazans are courting death.



Observers point out that the 2012 ceasefire agreement was repeatedly violated by Israel — it imposed a brutal, illegal siege, made armed attacks on Gaza, attacked fishermen in Gaza’s territorial waters and farmers in Gaza and killed Gazans by missiles and rockets. Israel also re-arrested several Palestinian prisoners who had been released in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli solider captured by Hamas. So a cease-fire agreement would only stop Israeli bombing. It would not stop its strangulation of Gaza.



Oxfam says that the blockade has devastated Gaza. Nearly 50 percent of its youth are unemployed and 80 percent of people depend on food aid. Exports are now 3 percent of their pre-blockade levels. Transfer of goods to the West Bank is banned. Most people are unable to leave or enter Gaza and are deprived of health care, education and other services.



Nathan Thrall, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, explained in the New York Times why Hamas has become desperate.



Though it won the last election, Hamas transferred formal authority in 2006 to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on President Mahmoud Abbas’s terms. Hamas also agreed to the US demand for non-violence, respecting past agreements and recognition of Israel through a long-term ceasefire. Israel torpedoed this reconciliation by blocking the payment of salaries of 43,000 civil servants who worked for Hamas and would work under the Palestinian Authority under the new agreement. It also refused to end the stifling border closures and siege of Gaza. Egypt also kept its border closed to Gaza.



Qatar had offered to pay Gaza’s 43,000 civil servants. But the US thwarted that arrangement. It also rebuffed a suggestion by a United Nations envoy that the salaries be paid through the UN.



Having kept Gaza under its stranglehold, Israel has agreed to a ceasefire that would return Gaza to a situation when it had electricity for barely eight hours a day, water was undrinkable, sewage was dumped in the sea, fuel shortages shut sanitation plants down and left waste on the streets and patients needing care were denied access to Egyptian hospitals.



Concluded Thrall: “The current escalation (of violence) in Gaza is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement. The road out of the crisis is a reversal of that policy.”



Noura Erakat, an assistant professor at George Mason University, states: “The primary issue is that of Israel’s military and colonial rule over the Palestinian population of the occupied territories, including Gaza, which is characterized by a discriminatory apartheid legal regime and brutal repression. When the rockets stop flying and the aerial strikes cease, Palestinians will continue to die a slow and protracted death under the boot of Israel’s occupation. In particular, the population in the Gaza Strip faces a horrific future. By 2020, it is predicated that Gaza’s one source of clean water will be unusable and the World Health Organizations says the 150-square mile Strip will be unlivable. Strong measures are required to hold Israel to account, aimed at ending the occupation and Israel’s apartheid regime through international legal institutions like the International Criminal Court, arms embargoes, and continued grassroots efforts by the Palestinian-led global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.”



Blogger Waleed Ahmed made the following points:



*Over 2,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza alone in the last seven years. The occupation, now in its 47th year, is one of the longest and bloodiest in human history.



*Israel’s discriminatory division of water means that Palestinians get 70 liters a day per person (far below the 100 liters per capita minimum)… Households in Gaza receive running water for only six-eight hours at a time about every other day. Gaza’s only water source, its Coastal Aquifier, will expire in 2016. At present, about 90 percent of the water supply in the Strip is contaminated and unfit for human consumption.”



Given Israel’s brutality and Western leaders’ hypocrisy, is it any wonder that Gazans are desperate?



Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.