It has been more than six months since Hamas seized control of Gaza and set in motion the current "West Bank First" strategy of slowly strangling the 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip while strengthening PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his pro-Western caretaker government in Ramallah.
Sometimes it seems like Gaza is perpetually on the brink of catastrophe, which often makes stories about the situation there sound like different versions of the same tune.
In the past week, though, there have been a number of new warnings about Gaza.
Today at the donor conference in Paris, Abbas said Gaza is "close to catastrophe," but again ruled out talks with Hamas that might bring the immediate crisis to an end.
One new United Nations report notes that 80 percent of the Gaza residents are now relying on the international community for food and aid.
A second United Nations survey of the Gaza private sector charts an "unprecedented decline" for the economy.
A World Bank report prepared for the Paris conference warns that the political and economic embargo on Gaza has "eroded its economic backbone" in a way that may be difficult to reverse.
The International Committee of the Red Cross called the current situation "alarming."
John Ging, the head of UNRWA who was targeted earlier this year my masked gunmen as he drove into Gaza, called the situation "atrocious."
And yet there doesn't seem to be any solution in the works.
From the Israeli and US perspective, the plan is doing just what they want it to do: Turn the screws on Hamas, which is losing popularity in Gaza as frustration builds.
"Hamas's popularity is suffering because it cannot deliver," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli PM Ehud Olmert.
But that isn't translating into the rise of an alternative in Gaza. And, even with Hamas popularity on the wane, some 200,000 people in Gaza turned out over the weekend to support the Islamist group.
The theory seems to be that the suffering will force Hamas to capitulate to international demands, though there isn't a lot of evidence to back up that contention.
Instead, as Ging said, "it's the ordinary people paying the price for this political failure."
Wow! Hamas "seized" Gaza?
Don't you care to inform your readers that Hamas had WON and then been denied their election mandate since January of 2006, when they finally "seized" Gaza by force in June 2007, since incumbent West-oriented Fatah refused to respect the democratic will of the Palestinian people, and relinquish power (and Israel and the West supported this).
What makes it worse is that you make HAMAS the subject of the sentence "set in motion the current 'West Bank first'...", suggesting that your description of Hamas "seiz[ing] control" was intentional, to give the impression that Israeli policies, as always, are the Palestinians' fault. That, despite the fact that when Hamas won its election in January 2006, it immediately offered peace to Israel in exchange for a complete withdrawal from occupied Palestine, which Israel renounced.
Yet Hamas is somehow responsible for the ridiculous policies of the West and Israel in trying to ensure a pliant client regime in the someday-but-not-too-soon state of Palestine.
[Note to McClatchy: there is enough Zionist propaganda elsewhere on the market; the people want real news!]
Posted by: MM | December 25, 2007 at 04:39 PM