Israel says it will place Gaza, the occupied territory it has long blockaded, under a “complete siege” after the weekend’s attack by Hamas.
On Saturday, the Palestinian military group launched intensive attacks from Gaza into Israel. Hamas overwhelmed Israeli military installations, killed over 700 people, kidnapped civilians and reportedly soldiers, and dispatched rockets on Israeli civilians. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was caught flat-footed despite Israel having the Middle East’s most advanced military and surveillance state.
Now comes the reaction. Israel has called up 300,000 military reservists, and many analysts expect that Israel will send in ground troops. “I ordered a complete siege on Gaza. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday. “As of now, no electricity, no food, no fuel for Gaza.”
But Gaza has been described as living under siege for 15 years, as documented by United Nations experts, journalists, and human rights researchers.
Israel and Egypt control the territory’s border crossings, and Israel controls its access to the Mediterranean Sea and its airspace. More than 2 million Palestinian people reside in a narrow strip, only about twice the area of Washington, DC. The humanitarian crisis that Palestinians have endured in Gaza has been severe even before this latest conflict, and now it will get much worse.
The United Nations reports that so far, 413 Palestinian people in Gaza have been killed and 2,300 have been injured, and those numbers will continue to rise. “Hospitals are overcrowded with injured people, there is a shortage of drugs and consumables, and a shortage of fuel for generators,” Ayman Al-Djaroucha, the Médecins Sans Frontières deputy coordinator in Gaza, told Reliefweb.
The scale of violence has already exceeded the most recent severe conflict between Israel and Hamas. Over a two-week period in May 2021,…
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