Madam, – The Israeli ambassador Boaz Modai hopes that his letter “may bring some clarity to the issue” of Israel’s relationship to the illegally besieged Gaza Strip (December 1st). Instead, it brings obfuscation, half-truths, and total falsehoods.
His reference to Hamas’s “part in the killing of 1,200 Israelis” deliberately omits a time-frame for this figure, which apparently covers the last decade. During this period, according to the Israeli humanitarian organisation B’tselem, some 6,500 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli state, a figure that does not include the large numbers who died as a result of inability to reach medical care owing to Israeli road closures, curfews, border crossings, etc. During Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 alone, over 1,400 Palestinians were killed, more than 300 of them children.
His reference to “Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the area” is a deception: Israel removed its illegal settlers from Gaza, but its armed forces continue to besiege the Strip. Under international humanitarian law (the Hague Convention, 1907, and the 4th Geneva Convention, 1949) Gaza is still occupied.
His comparison of Israel’s murderous interception of the Gaza flotilla last May with the arrests in 1973 and 1987 of the Claudia and the Eksund, “carrying Libyan-supplied weaponry bound for the IRA”, seems deeply dishonest.
The ships and boats carrying peace activists and humanitarian materials to Gaza were fully vetted by customs at their points of departure, and Mr Modai knows this well.
His claim that “there is no humanitarian crisis and no hunger in Gaza” is quite simply obscene. As recently as November 30th,Jeremy Hobbs, Director of Oxfam International, stated that “only a fraction of the aid needed has made it to the civilians trapped in Gaza by the blockade”. Israel prevents normal economic life (including all exports) in Gaza, and goods imported through tunnels from Egypt are beyond the means of most Gazans.
Hamas, legally elected in 2006 in the only democratic vote ever held in an Arab country, is a symptom and not a cause of the region’s travails. The organisation’s rise to power was facilitated by Israel in the late 1980s, in an all- too successful attempt to split Palestinian resistance to the illegal occupation. This is the context that “may bring some clarity to the issue.” – Yours, etc,