Two pieces of news about Gaza that should shock the world and reveal our complicity.
This:
A UN report published Tuesday says poverty in the Gaza Strip has deteriorated to levels unseen since 1967.
The UN trade and development agency says 90% of Gaza’s residents are currently beneath the poverty line and rates the damages caused by the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead at $4 billion, a sum it claims is three times larger than the Strip’s annual market performance.
The Israeli official figures seriously underestimated the civilian Palestinian death toll exacted during its onslaught in Gaza early this year, according to painstaking research to be published today.
The first detailed casualty figures from an Israeli human rights organisation since the war ended puts the number of children under 16 killed in the offensive at 252 as opposed to the 89 cited by the military. B’Tselem says its fieldworkers gathered death certificates, photos, and testimonies relating to all 252 of the children.
B’Tselem, which said it had carried out “months of meticulous investigation and cross-checks with numerous sources” has, unlike the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), made public the names of all those it said were killed in the war. It said that since the IDF had refused to furnish the agency with its own detailed list, it was impossible to compare the names but that “the blatant discrepancy between the numbers is intolerable.”