That “Humanitarian Crisis” in Gaza is Far Worse Than Anyone Imagined

posted at 2:34 pm on June 11, 2010 by Howard Portnoy
[ Israel ]   

According to Bill Kristol of  The Weekly Standard, White House sources have been giving assurances to foreign governments that the administration intends to back an effort next week at the U.N. to set up an independent commission to investigate Israel’s behavior in the Gaza flotilla incident.

Not a minute too soon, either, for this White House act of betrayal of an ally. Shipments like the one Israel stopped simply must get through (along with $400 million Obama has agreed to pony up) lest the hungry, shivering masses in Gaza succumb starvation and/or the elements.

So we are informed, in any case, through lurid accounts in the mainstream media. But a recent communique from the Palestinian-run Government Press Office paints a starkly different picture, albeit one intended for regional journalists’ eyes only. An email received by members of the Foreign Press Association in Israel, sent by the GPO in the hopes of generating more venomous anti-Israeli screed, describes conditions in Gaza that sound more paradisiacal than concentration-camp.

Tom Gross, who writes for the blog Mideast Dispatch Archive (h/t my buddy Steven), obtained a copy of the email, along with photographs, both detailing the unspeakable conditions under which Palestinians in Gaza live. Among the meager scraps on which the people are forced to subsist are steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu at the local four-star restaurant. To cool off when the weather gets a little too balmy, they have little recourse beyond taking a dip in a pool that is Olympic-sized, but not a millimeter longer.

In all fairness, it should be noted that the children of Gaza have no summer camp to attend. They had one, set up by the U.N., but Hamas burned it down because it was “un-Islamic.” Hamas also threatened the lives of the U.N. staff that ran the camp, but, hey, these are struggling people. Cut them some slack!

“Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” Gross writes, “live a middle class (and in some cases an upper class) lifestyle that Western journalists refuse to report on because it doesn’t fit with the simplistic story they were sent to write.”

An account by Danish reporter Steffen Jensen, quoted at Jihad Watch, corroborates Gross’s account. By way of introduction, Jensen writes:

The Palestinian community’s immediate downfall has been prophesied numerous times in the media. People have nothing to eat, we sometimes know. The UN must from time to time to stop food distribution, either because their stocks are running low, or because they can not get diesel for their trucks, and therefore can not carry food in. And so on.

Yet, on a visit to the area, Jensen discovered “no shortage of vegetables, fruits or any other ordinary, basic foods. Tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, watermelons, potatoes—mountains of these items in the many stalls.” Shocking!

In short, Jensen found nothing to confirm the MSM depiction of Gaza as “desperate … on the brink or at the level of a third world country.”

About the only hardship facing the people of Gaza is Hamas. And that frankly is a mess of their own making.

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