[WATCH] War crimes: Israel’s siege punishes Gazans mercilessly

On his first entry into Gaza in September 2009, Karl Schembri – a former MaltaToday editor embarking on a new career as a correspondent for the Ramattan news agency in the West Bank – witnessed the utter destruction left by the Israeli attacks in Operation Cast Lead back in December 2008.

Life, it seemed, had to go on because that is all one can do in this besieged enclave with a land area just like Malta’s, home to over 2.4 million people who cannot leave the strip.

Throughout the four years spent in Gaza, Schembri – now a humanitarian worker in East Africa – lived through the attacks from Israel of November 2012, where he could hear the missiles launched by the Israeli navy out at sea, whizzing overhead towards the heart of the city, and fighter jets and drones dropping their bombs. Gaza was still rebuilding from the rubble of Operation Cast Lead – most of it through foreign aid funding – and now it was being destroyed again.

The EU’s threat to stop aid to Palestine is cruel posturing: not one single cent of our euros has gone to Hamas. It is Palestinians who need the aid the most: and most of the EU aid has been destroyed by nobody but Israel

The cycle continues, as Israel launches unforgiving reprisals for a daring attack last week led by Hamas militias many thought impossible, surprising the Israeli army and carrying out a heinous attack on unsuspecting festival-goers just two miles outside the Gazan border. Hundreds on both sides are dead within just days, and thousands injured by a volley of rockets fire from Gaza and Israel.

Schembri’s old neighbourhood in Rimal, is no longer. It was totally wiped out by the Israeli attacks this week: his friend tells him life now is just apocalyptically grey, with food and water supplies running out and Israel threatening to target any aid entering through Rafah in the south.

“For the 2.4 million Palestinians living in this densely populated area on top of each other, their movements are completely sealed off – it is a siege carried out with the complicity of the Egyptian government at the south, but ultimately Israel is the occupier,” Schembri says of the daily life of constant surveillance, monitoring and regulation, for both Gazans and those in the West Bank – but more dramatically in Gaza where Israel restricts the movement of people and goods going in and out.

When Schembri lived in Gaza, life was impossible with daily 8-hour power cuts. Palestinians were barred from visiting their relatives on the other side. “My former landlady was refused by Israel from travelling to the West Bank for treatment when she found out she had breast cancer... she had to take the expensive rout to Egypt and then fly to Jordan,” Schembri says.

Despite promises in the 2012 ceasefire agreement to ease the blockade, Gaza was actually more blockaded than ever, as the tunnels linking it to Egypt and bringing daily essential goods had been all but destroyed.

“Students with scholarships to the United States and the United Kingdom are not allowed to leave, so that’s their future thrown the drain. Everything is regulated by Israel – so the most accurate description that is always said about Gaza is that it is the world’s largest open-air prison: trapped civilians who have committed no crime.”

While Europe has rushed to condemn the terror attacks of the Islamist militia of Hamas, which controls Gaza, supporters of the Palestinian cause say the incursion is akin to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, in which the trapped inmates of this Middle Eastern ghetto, decided to bring down the walls of the prison themselves. But the response of the Israeli attack has been equally merciless with hospitals overwhelmed as the Israeli army continues bombardment of the Gaza Strip, and bombardments hitting close to  the Rafah border crossing on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Schembri says that as Israel takes yet another mighty step forward to besiege Gaza entirely, it bears reminding that starving off Gazans by cutting off their supplies would be catastrophic, a war crime in and of itself.

“Children born here have no other reality: they are raised in a constant situation of violence, waking up to this latest escalation to find that half of their class has been wiped out by an airstrike from the night before. And they grow in a conservative society that is only closed off to the rest of the world,” Schembri says, in a suggestion of the kind of outcome that results from imprisoning an entire population.

“So the levels of injustice, cruelty and barbarity that these people endure, a trauma that never ends, means an escalation is always around the corner – it is the root cause that is not being tackled by the powers that be.”

With the European Commission now forced by member states into a volte-face over a purported view of humanitarian aid (it had previously been accused of delaying over €215 million in EU aid for critical healthcare in 2022), Schembri points out that the EU should not stop its aid to Gazans.

“The EU, the most generous donor to Palestine, now says it might stop the aid, when not one single cent of our euros has gone to Hamas. It is cruel posturing, when it is Palestinians who need the aid the most: most of the EU aid has been destroyed by nobody but Israel – schools built by EU money for children, essential services that keep them in classrooms, or water wells for West Bank farmers that got destroyed by Israel because they do not allow any development by Palestinians. So this is the root cause of the double standards in the way the world treats Palestinians.”

But Schembri adds that it is this hypocrisy, betrayed by the international response to the Hamas attacks, that continues to perpetrate the lack of response to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinians.

“We face a double standard on the Palestinians’ inalienable right to freedom and self-determination, as opposed to other theatre around the world where indigenous people facing the same existential problem, get a different treatment – rightly so – and all the support they need.

“This could really be solved quickly if the powers that be, the countries with most influence, tackle these deep-rooted problems that have been left to fester for so long... at the end of the day, it is for the Palestinians to determine what their future is to be, and at the core there is the fight for freedom, dignity and some form of self-determination.”