EVEN THE AFRIKAANERS WEREN'T GENOCIDAL:

An additional indicator of how dire things have become is the declining number of supply trucks entering the Gaza Strip from Israel through the Kerem Shalom border crossing. Two years ago, some 2,000 trucks entered each day. Last year the number was down to 1,000, and last month it barely reached 400. The explanation lies in the sharply reduced purchasing power of Gaza's 2 million besieged residents, and the number of trucks reflects the bare minimum required to keep them alive.

"You're talking about purchasing power and I'm telling you that we're talking about dying and death," says a Gaza journalist who spoke with Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity given the ban by Hamas on Palestinian contacts with Israelis. The journalist is in his 50s. He has been through two Palestinian uprisings against Israel and numerous military clashes between Gaza and Israel, and he has covered the distressing circumstances of Gaza's residents before the closure and since. His descriptions of recent days are a painful outcry to the world. "It doesn't get any worse than this; there's nowhere lower to go. It's worse than life in the Middle Ages," he says. "People are hoping to die because death is preferable to the life they are leading in Gaza."

Like all Gaza Palestinians, he blames Israel for the situation. Israel, on the other hand, blames the Islamist Hamas movement that has ruled Gaza since ousting Fatah in 2007. It ignores the findings of the state comptroller, who wrote in 2017 that Israel had never seriously examined the implications of its siege on Gaza and never made serious attempts to resolve the dangerous standoff.

Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz has been trying for more than two years to advance a grandiose plan to build a port for Gaza on an artificial island across from its coast. The port could be used to bring food and other vital supplies into the Strip, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman have consistently rejected the idea. Absent a fundamental, inherent solution to the problem, the Israel Defense Forces civil administration (for the West Bank and Gaza) keeps offering panaceas that are about as useful as an aspirin to a terminally ill patient.

For the past few months, as reported here, the professional echelons in Israel's military have been suggesting that Gaza residents be allowed to work in agricultural communities in Israel's south, but Liberman nixed this initiative too. They are now proposing that Israel ease the passage of Gaza merchants into Israel in light of the declining number of those coming to Israel for trade purposes.

A recent report by Gisha, an Israeli nongovernmental organization dedicated to freedom of movement for Palestinians, indicates that Israel tightened its closure in 2017 and the situation of Gaza residents had deteriorated. The report claims that the decision on tougher measures against Gaza was adopted without any public discourse and implemented without advance warning.

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