I’m delighted to reveal that Amira Hass, the award-winning Israeli reporter and correspondent for Haaretz and a journalistic hero of mine, has written our cover story on Gaza for the New Year special issue of the New Statesman – which hits news-stands tomorrow. Two years on from the Israeli onslaught on the strip, Hass examines the legacy of the three-week war and asks whether Israeli troops are preparing for another conflict with the poor Palestinians of Gaza.
I’ve written a short “box” to go with her essay, in which I examine the ongoing Israeli-Egyptian blockade against the Gazans and note the release of three official Israeli government documents that suggest the Jewish state had considered “a policy of deliberate restriction” of basic goods into the strip.
Here’s an extract:
In October, the Israeli human rights group Gisha published three documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that outlined the Israeli government’s policy for permitting transfer of goods into Gaza prior to Tel Aviv’s attack on the international aid flotilla on 31 May. The released documents showed that the Israeli state approved “a policy of deliberate restriction” of basic goods, including food and fuel, to people living in the Gaza Strip.
The published papers contained a series of mathematical formulae, created by the Israeli ministry of defence, to calculate the “product inventory” inside the strip. “The calculations are presumed to allow Cogat [Co-ordinator of Government Activities in the Territories] to measure what is called the ‘length of breath’,” the Gisha website notes. “The formula states that if you divide the inventory in the Strip by the daily consumption needs of residents, you will get the number of days it will take for residents of Gaza to run out of that basic product, or in other words, until their ‘length of breath’ will run out.”
The documents expose the cynicism of Israeli government officials – and yet, as the media analysis website Media Lens has remarked, not a single British newspaper has reported on their existence.
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Read the whole piece in the magazine tomorrow.
In the meantime, check out the Gisha website for the full selection of documents, translated from Hebrew into English.
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