Gaza has the look of a Third World country, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, undeveloped. Rather it is "de-developed," and very systematically.
And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 2 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.
Gaza is often described as ‘the world’s largest open-air prison’ because no one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons.they don’t have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day.
The U.S. and Israel had already initiated their program to separate Gaza
and the West Bank, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish
the Araboushim in both territories.
Punishment of Gazans became still
more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: They
voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world,
electing Hamas.
The restricted Rafah Crossing doesn’t change the fact that “Gaza remains under tight maritime and aerial siege, and continues to be closed off to the Palestinians’ cultural, economic and academic capitals in the rest of the (Israeli-occupied territories), in violation of U.S.-Israeli obligations under the Oslo Accords.”
The Oslo Accords were series of interim agreements reached between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel starting in 1993, which led to a US-brokered “peace processs” that was purported to lead to Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. Although the Oslo process broke down by 2000, many of its interim measures—including the formation of the Palestinian Authority and the division of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C—remain in place today. Throughout the Oslo period Israel was in constant breach of its commitment not to “initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”, by continuing its expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank including East Jerusalem. From 1993 to 2000 the population of these settlements rose dramatically from 263,000 to 357,000.
All this is part of the general program that Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Prime Minister Olmert, described after Palestinians failed to follow orders in the 2006 elections: “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Palestinian children and youth grow up in a society characterised by fear, lack of security, hopelessness and the lack of work, medical services, food, freedom of movement and other essentials.
Gaza is described by many Palestinians and humanitarian actors as the world’s largest open-air prison, where more 2 million Palestinians live behind a blockade and are refused access to the other occupied Palestinian areas and the rest of the world.
The Gaza Strip could have become a prosperous Mediterranean region, with rich agriculture and a flourishing fishing industry, marvelous beaches and, as discovered a decade ago, good prospects for extensive natural gas supplies within its territorial waters. By coincidence or not, that’s when Israel intensified its naval blockade. The favorable prospects were aborted in 1948, when the Strip had to absorb a flood of Palestinian refugees who fled in terror or were forcefully expelled from what became Israel – in some cases months after the formal cease-fire. Israel’s 1967 conquests and their aftermath administered further blows, with terrible crimes continuing to the present day.
Israel Terrorist authorities have committed a range of abuses against Palestinians. Many of those in the occupied territory constitute severe abuses of fundamental rights and the inhumane acts again required for apartheid, including: sweeping movement restrictions in the form of the Gaza closure and a permit regime, confiscation of more than a third of the land in the West Bank, harsh conditions in parts of the West Bank that led to the forcible transfer of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, denial of residency rights to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their relatives, and the suspension of basic civil rights to millions of Palestinians.
Many of the abuses at the core of the commission of these crimes, such as near-categorical denial of building permits to Palestinians and demolition of thousands of homes on the pretext of lacking permits, have no security justification. Others, such as Israel’s effective freeze on the population registry it manages in the occupied territory, which all but blocks family reunification for Palestinians living there and bars Gaza residents from living in the West Bank, use security as a pretext to further demographic goals. Even when security forms part of the motivation, it no more justifies apartheid and persecution than it would excessive force or torture, Human Rights Watch said.
Source : https://101.visualizingpalestine.org/resources/audiovisuals/israels-wall-security-or-apartheid
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/27/abusive-israeli-policies-constitute-crimes-apartheid-persecution
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