Desperation at Gaza crossing (photo: Mohammed Saber/European Pressphoto Agency)Rembrandt surely could have painted this image. Look at the shafts of light streaming down on the heads of these huddled suffering souls abandoned to their fate at the Erez checkpoint. Note the immense and forbidding wall behind them which hems them in. And the darkness at the edges of the image portend the misery they have already suffered and continue to suffer.
I am proud that Israeli NGOs petitioned the High Court for relief of this unnecessary suffering. The Court found for the NGOs, though what practical bearing this will have on Israeli government policy is anyone’s guess since the IDF has always found multitudinous ways to subvert or ignore similar such past rulings:
The High Court of Justice instructed the State Attorney’s Office on Tuesday night that “everything Israel can do to save human life must be done today,” following a petition submitted by “Doctors for Human Rights” and “Gisha” that Erez Crossing be opened immediately to allow sick and wounded Gazans into Israel.
…Some 190 Palestinians holed up in a stench-filled concrete tunnel at the border crossing with northern Gaza , desperately trying to flee the Hamas-controlled Strip.
Meanwhile, hoping to prevent a humanitarian crisis and to end the standoff at the Erez Crossing, defense officials revealed that Israel had asked Egypt to evacuate some 100 Palestinian women and children holed up at the border terminal.
The officials said Israel expected Egypt to play a role in solving the crisis at Erez, where a few hundred Gazans – mostly affiliated with Fatah – have taken refuge from Hamas.
Israel has refused to allow them passage to the West Bank, saying that some of them are wanted terrorists, including, for example, one who was involved in 2002’s standoff with the IDF at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Now, isn’t that interesting. Israel wants Egypt to solve this crisis for them. Fat chance. Why don’t they “prevent a humanitarian crisis and end the standoff” by letting the people transit from Gaza to the West Bank as they wish to do?? And do you punish 190 people because one person is wanted? Let the other 189 go to the West Bank and let the other guy stay at Erez. Sometimes (often?), Israeli officials seem to be utter nincompoops.
For more on the callousness of Israeli high-officialdom get a load of this passage from the Post’s report about Ehud Barak taking up his new Defense Ministry post:
Defense officials said Barak had yet to convene a discussion on the Erez Crossing crisis but would probably do so in the coming days. Most of his meeting were about highly-classified issues that required his immediate attention.
190 rotting Gazans certainly doesn’t warrant his immediate attention. But plotting the next war against them does.
The IDF has allowed a grand total of five Palestinians to be evacuated to Israeli hospitals of the 650 who were injured in last week’s Gaza violence. That’s mighty white of ’em, don’t you think?
