It is hard to understand why the members of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee were surprised at the report of the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) military intelligence directorate, Gen. Herzl Halevi, who said at a Feb. 23 hearing, “The humanitarian condition in Gaza is progressively deteriorating, and if it blows up, it’ll be in Israel’s direction.” Where were the Knesset members in recent years, when reports from the Gaza Strip painted a very grim picture of almost 2 million residents living under siege, in terrible economic distress, in unemployment, in ruins, in frustration and in depression? If not for the food banks run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the Gaza Strip would have already become a humanitarian catastrophe and many of its residents could have died of starvation.
Have any members of the most prestigious committee of the Knesset bothered to read the UN report published in September, which determined that if current trends continue, Gaza could become uninhabitable by 2020? Or perhaps they thought of the report as another anti-Israel publication from the United Nations. In contrast to these Knesset members, from what the chief of military intelligence said it seems he has actually adopted the report’s conclusions.
If any Knesset member thinks that this is a long-term prediction, he must remember that the year 2020 will arrive in only four years — one year after the official date of the end of the Knesset’s current term.
The Gaza Strip is under a blockade Israel has enforced since the Hamas revolution in June 2007. Since 2013, the border between Gaza and Egypt has also been closed and sealed. In recent months, the Israeli media has hardly reported on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. One story did find a place in the inner pages of Israeli newspapers: the grim situation of the animals dying in the Gaza zoo. It seems that a photo of a dying tiger does better in the Israeli press than destroyed neighborhoods and barefoot children in Gaza’s refugee camps. We can assume that only a few decision-makers and newspaper readers in Israel made the obvious connection between the state of the animals and the state of humans in the territory.
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