If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

This week, we have seen once again how Israel employs the “unlimited use of limited force” to provoke a response from Gaza and to thereby undermine the fragile tahdiya—the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire in place since last June.

Last Tuesday, while the world’s attention was focused on the United States’ presidential election, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip… Ostensibly there to destroy several smuggling tunnels, they encountered resistance (naturally) and killed six Palestinian militants. In response, dozens of Palestinian rockets were subsequently fired into Israel. And in response, Israel made a statement “regretting” Hamas’s hostility and eagerly shut Gaza’s borders, exacerbating the already disastrous humanitarian conditions. Soon after, Israel also forced Gaza’s main power plant to close by cutting fuel supplies, a move which plunged hundreds of thousands into darkness (yet again). Ehud Olmert threateningly declared that a “full-scale” Israeli operation in Gaza is not a question of “if” but “when”, even as he blamed Gaza for breaking the truce! And in response, rockets continue to fly over the border from Gaza into Israel.

And in response… and in response…

Israel routinely exercises its dominance over Gaza in this way; its collective punishment of these people is nothing new. Yet, the daily U.N. security briefing I read informed me that Israel had closed Gaza not only to fuel and food shipments, but had also blocked international journalists from entering or exiting the Strip. In fact, a week-long ban had been placed on journalists’ movement in an out of the area following this week’s spike in violence. Inevitably, the story was picked up by the international media—justifiably outraged that Israel should impose such restrictions on their reporting (although it is really nothing compared to the indefinite restrictions placed on Gaza’s population by the Israeli authorities).

But why ban journalists from Gaza?

The answer has an obvious answer—an answer that has played out tragically in humanitarian crises the world over. If journalists act as the eyes of the international community, if they are “witness[es] to history” as Robert Fisk once put it, then those unwilling to allow their atrocities to be witnessed have a simple task before them: simply block the source of the world’s sight; block the movement of journalists.

One needs only spend a single day in Gaza to realize why Israel is skeptical of allowing internationals—and now international journalists—into the territory.

John Ging, head of UNRWA operations in Gaza recently described the situation to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:

“The situation here in Gaza is desperate. There’s 750,000 refugees depending on handouts of food from UNRWA. Why? Because the economy has been destroyed in this period of time when crossings have been closed. These people have been reduced to be dependent on this food, and now we can’t even get that food into Gaza. It’s a disaster.”

The Strip is a model of abject poverty, a crisis initiated by decades of brutal occupation and exploitative economic policies, but a crisis that has plunged to new depths during Israel’s draconian long-term closure of the territory since June 2007. Ging’s figure of 750,000 represents only the refugees seeking hand-outs from the UN and does not include hundreds of thousands of others also seeking food from the World Food Programme (WFP) and other aid agencies. In all, 80% of Gaza’s population, some 1.2 million people are now dependent on food aid and the number increases by the day. Indeed, Israel is skeptical of internationals for one reason alone: there is no justification for the deliberate pauperization and starvation of Gaza’s population.