Gaza: Can Anyone Hear Us?
- Sara Roy
- Jul 1, 2024
- 37 min read
Updated: Jul 6
Gaza: Can Anyone Hear Us?[1]
In a Washington Post article published on 16 December 2023, the reporter David Ignatius wrote:
For three days this past week, I traveled the West Bank, from the arid hills below Hebron in the south to the chalky heights of Nablus in the north. What I saw was a pattern of Israeli domination and occasional abuse that makes daily life a humiliation for many Palestinians—and could obstruct the peaceful future that Israelis and Palestinians both say they want.
Driving the roads of the West Bank is—forgive the term—a ‘two-plate’ solution. Israeli settlers with yellow license plates zoom along on a well-guarded superhighway called Route 60. Palestinians with white plates navigate small, bumpy roads. Since Oct. 7, many of the entrances to their villages have often been closed. Traveling in an Israeli taxi with a Palestinian driver, I saw some of both worlds.
I watched backups at Israeli checkpoints near Bethlehem and Nablus that were over a half-mile long and could require waits of more than two hours. The delays, indignities and outright assaults on Palestinians have become a grim routine. ‘If I’m in a yellow-plate car, does that change my blood?’ asked Samer Shalabi, the Palestinian who was my guide in the Nablus area.
My tour of the West Bank was a reality check about what’s possible ‘the day after’ the Gaza war ends. President Biden and other world leaders speak hopefully about creating a Palestinian state once Hamas is defeated. I’d love to see that happen, too. But people need to get real about the obstacles that are in front of our eyes.[2]
I was struck by this piece of reporting—well-intentioned though it was—for the absence of context and history that it reveals. Is Mr. Ignatius only now discovering the occupation and its pernicious impact on Palestinian life, the relentless oppression waged against Palestinians over nearly six decades? Can he now, finally, begin to see the context that led to the current horrific loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives?
In the more than four months since the 7 October conflict erupted, Israel has dropped over 45,000 bombs on Gaza weighing more than 65,000 tons, which is equivalent to three atomic bombs like those dropped on Hiroshima. This has resulted in a level of destruction that is ‘comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern period’, comparable to the bombing of Dresden during the second world war. According to Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist, ‘the word “Gaza” is going to go down in history along with Dresden and other famous cities that have been bombed. What you’re seeing in Gaza is in the top 25% of the most intense punishment campaigns in history’.[3]
Between 7 October 2023 and 19 February 2024, over 29,092 Palestinians have been killed (approximately 70 percent are women and children), 69,028 injured (or 3.0 percent of Gaza’s population) and 1.7 million (out of 2.3 million or 74 percent) have been internally displaced. During the same period, there have been over 1200 Israelis killed (including foreign nationals), approximately 5,400 injured and 134 remain hostage in Gaza.[4] Conservatively, between 29-37 percent of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed[5] including over 60 percent of Gaza’s homes (over 70,000 destroyed or made uninhabitable and over 290,000 damaged) in addition to apartment buildings, water and sanitation infrastructure, factories, businesses hotels, shopping malls, theaters, mosques, and churches. Approximately 92 percent of all school buildings have been damaged (in addition to 392 educational facilities) or are used as shelters. All of Gaza’s universities have been damaged or destroyed and are no longer operational. Similarly, the number of functioning hospitals has dropped from 36 to 14 (11 are partially functional and three are running at minimal capacity).[6] By the second half of November, the World Bank estimated that ‘60 percent of Gaza’s ICT, health and education infrastructure had been destroyed [and] 70 percent of its commerce-related infrastructure’, resulting in an unemployment rate of 85 percent (given the closure of 56,000 businesses and a loss of 147,000 formal sector jobs).[7]
The northern Gaza Strip has no access to clean water and the south receives a meager water supply from one pipeline coming from Israel. By 2 January, there was a full electricity blackout throughout the Gaza Strip, which has continued.[8] The systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure has led to the ‘rapid spread of infectious disease’.[9] Consequently, the World Health Organization warns that the outbreak of disease could ultimately kill more Palestinians than Israeli bombs.[10] According to Professor Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, ‘A quarter of [Gaza’s] population could die within a year due to outbreaks of disease caused by this unprecedented conflict’[11] where ‘indirect health related deaths…can outnumber direct deaths by more than 15 to 1’.[12]
