Eric Margolis on life in Gaza

I have been watching and writing about the agony of Palestine for some 70 years.   I’ve watched what was to have been a small Jewish enclave grow into a powerful Sparta with some 200 nuclear weapons and unprecedented control of the US Congress and media. 

Gaza, this miserable, squalid human garbage dump, is a giant open-air prison packed with 2.2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948.  Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders.  Palestinians are only allowed to fish along the shore.  Coastal gas and oil reserves have been expropriated by Israel and Egypt.

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Gaza’s two million people subsist on the edge of starvation.  Israel openly boasts that it allows just enough food into the enclave to prevent outright starvation.  Chemicals to treat water are banned.  Electricity runs only a few hours daily because the power plant was bombed by Israel’s US-supplied air force.  Hospitals have almost no medicines.  In short, wartime conditions in the open-air prison.  Even the wretched animals in Gaza Zoo are starving.  Hamas fighters have reportedly even killed cats and dogs.

The intensive punishment of Gaza, a crime under international law, began after its people voted in a free election for the Hamas movement over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which is more or less run by Israel and the United States.  Israel helped found Hamas in 1987 to split the PLO, but then sought, with the US, to destroy the organization, branding it ‘terrorist.’

~ Eric Margolis, "How Much Longer Will Palestinians Be Martyr People?," LewRockwell.com, October 14, 2023