Gaza continues to pay a heavy price

In the conflict between Israel and Hamas, innocent Gazans are caught in the crossfire

International donors have failed to deliver promised aid to help rebuild Gaza after last summer’s war. Mohammed Abed / AFP

Years pass and Gaza remains an open air prison, as the long-lasting Israeli blockade continues to cut off the flow of commercial goods into the strip, sometimes even denying access to humanitarian relief aid, including food and medicine.

It’s not even 12 months since an open-ended truce between Israel and Hamas was agreed, but innocent civilians continue to pay a heavy price of the conflict. On Tuesday night, Israeli jets launched four strikes on Gaza in retaliation for a cross-border rocket attack by Hamas on the city of Ashdod. The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, claimed responsibility earlier in the day saying that one of their five experimental rockets fired into the sea had landed in the southern Israeli city by mistake.

Amid the conflict, the innocent people of Gaza live in fear of attack by the Israeli army and of intimidation by Hamas. Strangling Necks, an Amnesty International report published yesterday, described a culture of “score settling” by Hamas last year against Palestinian civilians that extended to executions and unstinting brutality.

In addition, international donors have failed to deliver promised aid to rebuild Gaza after last summer’s war between Hamas and Israel that killed about 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 73 on the Israeli side, most of them soldiers. According to a report by the Association of International Development Agencies, only 26.8 per cent ($945m) of the promised aid pledged by donors at last October’s conference in Cairo had been delivered. The report also said that reconstruction has barely begun. The international community continues to fail to bring justice to the Palestinians.

The question now is, was the recent attack premeditated? An Israeli general said the reality was that Hamas’s territory was a “staging ground” for attacking Israel, which was “unacceptable and intolerable and will bear consequences”. This means that Israel still sees Gaza as a target that needs to be repeatedly hit. As the anniversary of last year’s Gaza war approaches, we don’t know what will happen in the future, but we do know that without reaching a solution, innocent Palestinians will continue to bear a heavy burden.