Gaza is under closure again. If, until recently, it seemed to the leaders of Hamas both in Gaza and on the outside that after seven years of a suffocating siege, all their troubles were about to disappear, they are now seeing their world turning against them. Just a few months ago, the members of the organization were speaking rather seriously about how they managed to break through the barriers to receive international legitimacy, and how, very soon, they would be conducting a normal foreign policy, just like all the nations of the world. There were even those who tried to persuade Europe and the United State to remove Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations and to treat its government as the official representative of the people living in the Gaza Strip.

Then the skies came crashing down on them. Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was deposed, and Hamas was pilloried along with him. Egypt’s new regime considers Hamas an enemy. The Egyptian army has launched a far-reaching offensive in the Sinai, and is waging a war of annihilation against the subterranean network of smuggling tunnels in Rafah, which were the main source of food and raw materials for the Gaza Strip. The light they saw at the end of the tunnel just a few months ago went out in a flicker. The markets emptied of goods, gasoline for automobiles has just about run out, and emergency stockpiles of gasoline and diesel fuel are running very low as well. The electricity is turned off every few hours, hospitals report that there is a shortage of drugs, and even cigarettes have vanished from the shops.

Right now Gaza is going backward six or seven years to a situation in which it is hermetically sealed off, almost as it was after the Hamas military coup of June 2007. Representatives of UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, have spent decades ensuring that an epidemic of hunger doesn’t break out in the Gaza Strip. Now, however, they are reporting that the situation is very severe, though it is still premature to define it as a humanitarian crisis. The situation has been described this way before. The only reason it did not develop into a full-blown humanitarian crisis is because of UNRWA, and no less because of Israel’s concerns about the implications of a humanitarian crisis on its international standing.

Isn’t it remarkable? The whole world is silent! Almost no one shows any interest in the Gaza Strip. Even Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the self-appointed patron of Gaza, has gone back on his plans to visit there and show support for Hamas. He will not be holding Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh in a warm embrace. Nor does Erdogan have anything to say about the crisis these days, in contrast to his almost daily comments over the past six years. This time he isn’t threatening to send Turkish warships to accompany any aid flotillas trying to break through Israel’s maritime siege by sailing to El Arish.