Open War… The Questions of Gazans

In a remote conversation with an activist who had taken part in the local and municipal elections of the city of Deir al-Balah, he disclosed the personal reasons that had led him to vote for the first time: he wanted to experience the feeling of equality with the Jewish voter, whose opinion is canvassed every week across all domains of Israeli life. He also expressed a desire to feel some measure of human equilibrium as an original inhabitant of the land, in order to bridge the gap opened by Israel's overwhelming superiority, sustained by its modern army and the Iron Dome that shields it, while the sons of this land possess nothing but the capacity to survive, however great the scale of torment, brutality and humiliation.

This reality in Gaza has its counterpart in the West Bank, compounded there by the annexation and Judaization of land and the unrelenting construction of settlements.

The second difficult question concerns the approach to the yellow line dividing the east of the territory from the west, an approach that leads to death “by artificial intelligence.” This danger stems from the permanent shifting of that line’s contours to suit the daily needs of the occupation army, needs always defined as existential, in the face of which the sanctity of life counts for nothing.

The third question relates to the entry of food and medical aid, which Israeli oversight calculates according to the number of calories entering the territory. This is not an exaggeration: it is a reality officially declared so that the Israeli government cannot be held responsible for any famine it causes among a population already mired in the most severe deprivation.

Solidarity

The scandalous spectacle of a policy of systematic starvation served as a powerful catalyst for the launch of the “Global Steadfastness Fleet” last April, carrying with it a constellation of international activists, a little food, and a great deal of compassion. Its ships left the ports of Spain and France with a resounding cry to break the hermetic siege imposed on Gaza.

But the US State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott deemed what was happening an unacceptable transgression, stating in the newspapers of 5 May that “in accordance with the law, ports are considered internal waters over which states exercise their sovereignty.” This was a criticism of the conduct of the French and Spanish governments and their laxity on what he called a “sovereign” matter, ignoring the fact that the port of Gaza is not Israeli, just as he failed to observe that the one hundred and seventy-five activists were fully entitled to express their views, with not a single one among them sought by justice on terrorism charges.

The Israeli Prime Minister, for his part, did not hesitate for a moment to launch a naval and aerial operation against twenty peaceful vessels in international waters off the island of Crete, then staging a display of pride, boasting of having “succeeded in preventing the fleet from reaching its destination” and that they should “watch Gaza on YouTube,” according to his declarations of 20 April.

In their accounts of the arrests, the solidarity campaign activists described the methods employed by the Israeli commandos, including the use of the “electric stun baton” to neutralize any physical resistance. One of them nonetheless let out a cry demanding that the Israeli government build a “moral dome” to protect them, in lieu of the Iron Dome.

Destiny

The major military operations in the Gaza Strip officially ended on 10 October of last year with the announcement of President Trump’s twenty-point plan. Seven months have passed and we remain on the implementation of the first point. More than seven thousand people have been killed during this period, while approximately eighty-five percent of the population, some one million nine hundred thousand displaced persons, continue to live in makeshift shelters, lacking new tents whose delivery into the territory Israeli authorities forbid, while also blocking all heavy equipment needed to clear the rubble, in addition to restricting the number of food trucks permitted to enter.

During the latest Cairo negotiations, Israel made the disarmament of Hamas a precondition for moving to the second point of the Trump plan, which Hamas rejected, demanding in turn that an Israeli withdrawal come first. The population of the territory thus watches the negotiations unfold without anyone deigning to answer the fundamental question that haunts them, a question that concerns their own destiny and not that of the weapons. The Hamas leadership, meanwhile, appears confident in its position despite the assassination last week of its local commander Azzam al-Hayya, son of the movement’s senior official.

Most of the inhabitants of Gaza are unaware that the current Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayya, obtained an agreement from the White House, Qatar and Turkey allowing Hamas’s police and governmental apparatuses to exercise authority in the western part of the territory until the arrival of “peacekeeping forces,” which are themselves mired in deadlock, unable to fulfill their assigned mission due to divergences among the member states of the “Peace Council” over the definition of their mandate, the deliberately prohibitive Israeli conditions, and the procrastination in meeting the obligations of the first phase. The Israeli army has meanwhile succeeded in imposing facts on the ground regarding the question of Gaza’s armament by supplying and arming groups of marginalized individuals and professional criminals to whom it also provides protection, while families and clans have resorted to individual armament and some other factions continue to acquire sufficient light weapons to exercise a measure of local influence.

This territory now holds the full weight of Israeli weaponry, what remains of Hamas’s arms and its security apparatuses, the weapons of the collaborationist groups, and finally those of families, clans and other factions. It is precisely this that lends the debate over the priority of disarmament a well-defined function, that of perpetuating the armed state in the Gaza Strip as a pretext for maintaining the status quo, to the benefit of the Netanyahu government, which can thus exploit politically the weapons of Hamas and others to perpetuate the occupation for an indefinite period, during which operations of control and annexation of the eastern part of Gaza continue apace. And it is this that gives the question of the destiny of Gaza’s inhabitants a truly central dimension today.

Where is the Authority?

Since the bloody Hamas coup against the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip in 2007, the movement has built its own parallel governmental and police apparatuses. The National Authority in Ramallah, for its part, has continued to pay the salaries of approximately thirty-seven thousand civil and military employees, who nonetheless remain outside of active service in the territory.

Given that the question of opening the crossings on the Palestinian-Egyptian border is governed by a formal agreement between Israel and the Authority under American-European mediation, the Authority’s return to its role in managing the Rafah crossing, combined with the preparation of some ten thousand newly trained police personnel in Egypt and Jordan awaiting entry into the territory with the international peacekeeping force, would enable it to contribute to the construction of a solution.

Furthermore, its political presence is closely tied to its ability to execute its plan to hold legislative and presidential elections before the end of this year, which remains within the realm of possibility if circumstances allow and if the American administration agrees to prevent Israeli obstruction. Trump’s peace plan envisages the “Gaza Administration Committee” playing the role of a provisional local government, but that committee has itself not yet managed to enter the territory due to Israeli obstruction and the persistent failure to constitute the international peacekeeping force.

The questions multiplying among Gazans now concern what their destiny is bound up with: the outcome of the conflict with Iran, what is happening in Lebanon, or the intentions openly declared by the pillars of the Netanyahu government not to withdraw from the territory and indeed to annex a part of it as a buffer zone.

These are questions to which the inhabitants of Gaza find no convincing answer, for as long as the war has not laid down its arms.