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West Bank/Gaza

Even paper is not allowed

Diapers were on the list of allowable items this month, but not last month. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any logic to the type of commercial items allowed by Israel into the Gaza strip at all. The ostensible principle is that everything which is not on the list of allowable items could possibly be used to make weapons. But it’s hard to imagine how to make a bomb out of baby food.

Reduction of import

Along with the steep reduction in total imports from about 450 truckloads per day prior to the Israeli economic siege of the Gaza strip on the 12th June, 2007, to around 110 daily truckloads thereafter, the list of allowed imports – apart humanitarian aid – and the list of allowed commercial goods was reduced from over 400 to only 34 types of goods.
With a population of 1.7 million people, 110 trucks can’t begin to meet their needs for food and other household goods, to say nothing of items needed for construction, medicine, education, and basic human life. (The list of allowable items appears in its entirety below.)

Import of building materials is banned, which makes the rebuilding of bombed homes impossible.

Baby food is banned

Even the World Bank-funded Palestinian Trade Center cannot reconcile Israel’s official, ‘anti-terror’ justification for the economic closure with the types of items being prohibited. ‘Incomprehensibly, the restrictions are not exclusively imposed on a lengthy list of non-edible goods such as raw materials, construction materials, electronics, appliances, cars, furniture, etc., but also includes the banning of live animals and edible goods such as baby food, tomato paste, tea, beverages, chocolate, biscuits, mineral water, etc.’

But the closure is not limited to commercial goods; humanitarian agencies, such as the UN, which is responsible for the feeding of over 800,000 refugees in Gaza, have also seen the amount of their supplies allowed into Gaza dramatically decrease. Nor is the closure limited to land; fishing boats have seen their fishing rights reduced from an agreed 6 nautical miles, to 3 nautical miles, and now to 2 nautical miles, where almost no schools are found.

Collective punishment

Few in the west who followed news of the war knew that the Israeli invasion – purportedly in retaliation for the rockets being fired by militants from Gaza into Israel – came after a continuing campaign of 18 months of economic strangulation of the entire population. Fewer still are acquainted with the international legal principle of ‘collective punishment,’ codified in Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention, which holds that an entire population cannot be punished for the actions of some, even if those groups are responsible for resistance activities. But the Palestinians of the Gaza strip are all too aware of the tactic, if not the legal principle.