Gaza is being devastated by a triple impasse – Technologist

The situation in Gaza could be described as intolerable if the whole world had not tolerated it, actively or passively, for too many months. If the war were to have happened in France, the scale of the human toll would already be over a million killed, including some 400,000 children. And this death toll could well double, or even triple, due to the deadly combination of continued bombing, worsening famine and the spread of epidemics among a population literally on its last legs.

Worsening day after day, in full view of the world, this tragedy is part of a long-standing triple impasse – Israeli, humanitarian and Palestinian – in which the 2.3 million men and women in the Gaza Strip have been trapped for almost two decades.

The Israeli impasse

The Israeli deadlock began when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided, in September 2005, to withdraw the Israeli army and settlers from the Gaza Strip after 38 years of occupation, without any consultation with the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, elected a few months earlier. Sharon’s refusal was intended to block the way to an eventual Palestinian state established in both the West Bank and Gaza. Since then, the Palestinian enclave has been treated by Israel solely from the perspective of the security of the Israel state, without the slightest consideration for the political dynamics or human reality of Gaza.

This very short-sighted calculation has meant Israel, throughout successive conflicts in Gaza, has maintained a ratio of 1 to 20, or even 100, between its losses, overwhelmingly military, and Palestinian losses, primarily civilian. But the blockade imposed on Gaza since June 2007 consolidated Hamas’s stranglehold there, until the takeover, ten years later, by the most extremist of the Islamists, responsible for the terrorist carnage of October 7, 2023, in which 787 civilians were killed, along with 376 Israeli soldiers and police officers. The current offensive has left 245 of Israel’s soldiers dead over five months of fighting, but at the cost of strikes as massive as they are indiscriminate, leading to the destruction of the Gaza Strip rather than Hamas.

The humanitarian impasse

The humanitarian impasse is a result of the international community’s – above all the US and the European Union – refusal to provide a political response to the challenge of Gaza, reduced to being no more than a humanitarian problem to be managed with varying degrees of generosity and efficiency.

Far from demanding the lifting of the Israeli blockade, characterized as an act of war under international law, Western donors have confined themselves to trying to limit Israel’s impact on the local population, thus condemned to live only in the precariousness of assistance by definition arbitrary.

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