(Well said. – promoted by eli_beckerman)
Even amidst a two-day ceasefire that that began the 11th, the specter of a renewed, vigorous assault by Israeli forces similar to 2009’s Operation Cast Lead looms darkly over the war-torn Gaza strip. It’s the terrifying possibility that has haunted the rubble-strewn thin strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea and came screeching into full bore last week as the IDF tore into Gaza killing nineteen Palestinians and injuring seventy others. In addition to the deadly land, naval, and air attacks the IDF shut down the roads entering Gaza for a week, once again blockading medical supplies and aid from entering and causing drastic shortages of nearly 150 different kinds of medicines.
Even during the cease-fire Israeli officials have unabashedly shown their support for an escalation of the violence and bombing of the Gaza strip, with National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau publicly declaring that the IDF “needed to finish off the job in Operation Cast Lead” rather than agreeing to Hamas’ appeal for a cease-fire. Unfortunately it seems unlikely that Gaza can withstand another military action like Operation Cast Lead, the IDF’s brutal campaign that left over 1,500 dead and 6,000 injured, and the merciless blockade that accompanied it.
The blockade and assault were so brutal that in March the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Occupied Palestinian Territory reported that even three years later, and months after the blockade had been softened the humanitarian conditions of in Gaza are still deplorable. With the offensive having destroyed the majority of Palestinian factories, water purification plants, and more than five-thousand acres of arable land and Israel’s blockade policy of deliberate reduction for basic goods and undernourishment of Palestinian citizens it shouldn’t be surprising that the humanitarian conditions are dreadful. Currently the UN believes that based on a projection model from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization nearly eight-hundred and ninety-two thousand people in the Gaza strip are consistently unable to securely count on having food. Furthermore, currently over ninety percent of the fresh water taken from the aquifer fails to meet WHO standards, forcing Palestinians to purchase expensive desalination plants with no quality control. And health care has notably suffered as supply of essential medicines and medical disposables continues to straggle, and health care facilities are unable to upgrade or repair their medical equipment.
But what the UN pointed out particularly as damning of the humanitarian crisis was the significant loss of housing during the Operation Cast Lead offensive, and ongoing strict restrictions on building materials that have lead to a serious housing shortage, with nearly forty thousand more housing units needed. This housing crisis has forced significant overcrowding with large segments of the population being forced to live in poor, unsafe living conditions. The significant overcrowding- which can feature up to thirty people living in a small, three bedroom house- has contributed to a sharp uptick in domestic violence, and an equally dramatic downturn in health and hygiene.
One Gaza citizen, Mihdat Abu Ghneimeh, currently lives in a house- if the collection of rubble, asbestos, metal sheeting, and tarpaulin can properly be called a house- in eastern Gaza City directly above the ruins of his former home, which was bombed during Operation Cast Lead and has yet to be rebuilt.
“I am tired of this situation,” he says, “None of us has any privacy.” After all, Mihdat lives with his wife and their seven children in a single 30-square meter bedroom, and shares his make-shift house with twenty-six people from his extended family.
Those who have had their houses destroyed during the offensive make up a devastatingly large portion of Gaza’s homeless. Mihdat and his family are far from alone in having simply returned to the site of his ruined home after spending the initial three to six months in rented apartments, and constructing a crowded make-shift house out of the rubble. They didn’t do so without risk however.
Amongst the nearly six-hundred thousand tons of rubble that was left on the Gaza strip after Operation Cast Lead, there were nearly sixty thousand tons of hazardous materials like explosive ordinances that had failed to detonate properly on impact and deadly carcinogens like asbestos. These were not only the remnants of Mihdat and others Gaza citizens’ lives, with the price of cement rising astronomically from about 350 shekels ($92) to 3,400 shekels ($900) because they weren’t allowed in through the blockade this rubble was all that they had to build their new lives from.
Asbestos, which was common amongst the standing rubble in Gaza, has been banned from commercial and residential use in fifty countries and is heavily regulated in several others including the United States, Canada, and Israel because it is a potent carcinogen. When disturbed, sanded, broken, burnt, or cut, as nearly all of the asbestos in the rubble of the Gaza strip must have been, it can release thin, nearly invisible fibers into the air. When these asbestos fibers are inhaled or ingested, they may get trapped in the tissue of the lungs and remain there for years. As the fibers accumulate they cause tissue scarring and inflammation that result in mesothelioma, a cancer that ravages the lining of the lungs, the abdomen, and the heart. According to the US Census Bureau’s International Data Base, nearly one out of every one-hundred thousand people in Gaza has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, and the rates are expected to rise.
While there is not definitive information on the number of Palestinians who were killed or injured from the unexploded ordinances in the rubble, it was estimated that there were nearly four-hundred and nineteen sites through-out Gaza where there were likely to be unexploded ordinances, over one-hundred fifty of which were deemed high risk.
Construction materials have been undeniable difficult to come by, as the Israeli blockade that lasted since early 2007constricted the import of construction materials down to only about 0.05% of the levels they had previously been at. Even without Operation Cast Lead and other Israeli operations having destroyed upwards of fourteen thousands homes and apartments and based simply on population growth in the Gaza strip, an estimated twenty-six thousand and five hundred homes were needed to have been built. Because of the strict ban on construction materials however, it’s estimated that during the first three years of the blockade only somewhere between one and three percent of these houses were able to be constructed. Even since Israel has eased the blockade in the latter half of 2010, it’s estimated that the amount of concrete allowed into Gaza will still only suffice to cover about ten to fifteen percent of yearly housing growth needs- and completely fail to alleviate unmet needs from both the earlier years of the blockade and the destructive force of the Israeli offensives.
A common anecdote amongst Palestinians in Gaza about the difficult and overwhelming bureaucracy of obtaining concrete legally relates the story of a paltry one and a half tonnes of cement earmarked for repairs to damaged gravestones. Although the cement was cleared and requested by the UNRWA and the World Bank for gravestones in the Commonwealth cemetery dating back to early 20th century and World War I, the shipment was suspended and briefly revoked. Israeli military officials declared that it had been diverted by Hamas, although staff and civilians from the aid agency had seen the cement bags safely locked away at the graveyard.
This chokehold on concrete and other construction materials leaves Palestinians in the Gaza with few options; they can live in make-shift homes amongst the rubble like Mihdat’s family or, if they are wealthy enough, they can attempt to build new homes using contraband construction materials imported illegally through the tunnel systems connecting Gaza to Egypt.
In March, the UN reported that nearly ninety-eight thousand tons of construction materials passed through an estimated three hundred different tunnels in Gaza between October 2010 and February 2011, or nearly five times as much as legally entered the area during the same time period. Of course, this black market construction economy is certainly not without a bevy of risks itself.
“You’re working while being surrounded by death,” Abu Hanin, a 29 year-old father of eight, says, “you are digging your tomb with your own hands.” He compares describes working in the tunnels as being similar to going out to fight a war every day, and indeed as recently as Tuesday, four more Palestinian tunnel workers died in a smuggling tunnel, suffocating to death while attempting to repair a tunnel that had been hit by an Israeli missile several days earlier.
The materials that construction materials that come through tunnels are often shoddy, as over fifty percent of the construction materials that have entered Gaza since October are low quality concrete aggregates. This concrete aggregate is often made with chrysotile asbestos imported at low cost to Egypt from Canada and Russia.
Protestors in Canada especially have taken umbrage with Canada’s export of the deadly carcinogen in developing countries around the world. As the Canadian government debates propping up the Jeffrey Mine, which sits atop the world’s largest asbestos deposit, with a $58 million dollar loan ($51 million more dollars than they have thus spent on aid to Gaza) that should allow it to export over two-hundred tons of asbestos a day, protestors have converged to exclaim the mineral’s deadly potency.
“Anyone who says there’s controlled use of asbestos in the Third World is either a liar or a fool,” says Dr. Barry Castleman, an international expert on asbestos research and a representative of the World Trade Organization, “If this loan deal goes through, it will revive Canada’s asbestos industry and cost untold thousands to die.” Among those untold thousands will be Palestinians in Gaza who were forced to purchase aggregate cement at unreasonably high costs off the construction black market because of the continued stranglehold of construction materials entering Gaza.
“I don’t have a future,” Abu Hanin said, “As it is, there is no future in Gaza.” And because of the building blocks its built on, it’s hard not to see his point even as the Gaza’s construction industry faces its biggest boom in years. These Palestinians continue to move forward and build for the future but given the still squalid living conditions and the low mesothelioma life expectancy the only thing that’s clear is why the nightmare of another blockade or another offensive similar to Operation Cast Lead is so pervasive – the causalities are still climbing.