Vol. 72/No. 12      March 24, 2008

Tel Aviv preceded its invasion with escalating air strikes and attacks by unmanned drones. More than 120 Palestinians were killed in six days of air and ground assaults.

The pretext for the invasion, dubbed “Operation Warm Winter,” was an increasing volume of short-range missiles fired from Gaza into Israeli border towns.

Visiting Israel March 5, U.S. secretary of state Condoleeza Rice called Gaza a “terrorist state.” She said Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) “holds the people of Gaza hostage” and is “trying to make the path to a Palestinian state hostage to them.”

Hamas has been the ruling party in Gaza since it won elections there in January 2006. In the months following the elections, sharpening clashes between Hamas forces and those loyal to Fatah, the former ruling party, culminated in an open battle through which Fatah was driven from Gaza. Washington and Tel Aviv have sought to deal with and bolster the Fatah leadership and weaken Hamas.

“Since Hamas took Gaza Strip, we adopted a dual strategy,” Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni told a March 5 press conference with his U.S. counterpart. “And when I say ‘we,’ the meaning is the international community and, of course, the United States of America, Israel, and the pragmatic leaders in the Palestinian Authority.”

Livni continued, “The idea is to work with diplomatic leaders, to try and find and reach a peace treaty with them while simultaneously working in order to delegitimize Hamas as a terrorist organization.”

Alongside steady attacks on suspected Hamas militants in Gaza, Tel Aviv has enforced a near-total economic blockade. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs the “1.5 million Gazans still rely on Israel for all their supplies.” It reported that only 32 truckloads of goods entered Gaza from Israel in the last week of January. Prior to June 2007, 250 truckloads entered per day.

The majority of households in Gaza have power outages up to eight hours per day—some for more than 12 hours a day. Half the population has access to running water for only four to six hours a day.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home