Bulletin No45 avril 2024 Daily life in Gaza
For most people, war means being pounded by bombs 24/7, death, injury, utter destruction. That's mainly it, in fact. But the war also takes other forms, less visible but just as harmful for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Famine for example. The Israelis are using it to force the remaining people to leave Gaza City and the northern Strip. Some people died of starvation, including several children.
With the war and the blockade, everything has become unaffordable. Humanitarian aid and private sector imports are still not flowing in sufficient quantities. The price of a kilo of sugar, which was 4 shekels (1 euro), reached up to 70 shekels (17.50 euros). Now it has stabilized at 20 shekels (5 euros).
People are seeing goods reappear that they cannot afford
After the death of the six employees of the NGO World Central Kitchen and the UN resolution demanding a ceasefire until the end of Ramadan, the Israelis had promised to increase the number of trucks entering through the northern Gaza Strip. Apparently, deliveries did arrive in the north and Gaza City, but this was very insufficient. The inhabitants of northern Gaza saw the reappearance of things that they had forgotten existed, vegetables, meat. But everything is prohibitively expensive. A kilo of tomatoes costs 120 shekels (30 euros), a kilo of potatoes costs 100 shekels (25 euros). People see them, but they can't buy them.
In addition, there is no longer any cash in the banks throughout the Gaza Strip, because the Israelis are no longer allowing any to pass through. Previously, armored trucks transported the cash to supply the banks with shekels, dollars and Jordanian dinars. The dollars went to Egypt to pay the enormous sums that make it possible to leave Gaza – counting 35,000 dollars (nearly 33,000 euros) for an average family. Dollars are also used to pay for imports. And there are also Palestinian war profiteers who withdraw large sums of cash through their bank contacts.
To withdraw money from the Bank of Palestine, you have to queue for hours or even days to get 1,500 or 2,000 shekels. Sometimes there is no liquid at all.
Now prices are starting to fall, not because there is more supply, but mainly because people no longer have money to buy.
In Gaza, people just think about how to survive
The other psychological war waged by Israel are the threats they continue to make around an attack on Rafah, with the possibility of chasing away the 1.5 million displaced people who are piling up there. People are afraid of new massacres, afraid of new displacement. They are exhausted by these movements from one city to another, from one tent to another, to escape this war machine which does not distinguish between a human being, a building or a tree, and which destroys everything.
Gazans are so exhausted by everyday needs that they no longer think about the future, they just think about how to survive. The psychological consequences will be enormous, we will see them after the war.
There is also the war against the health system. The Israelis almost completely destroyed it. Al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, is nothing more than a shell. The Kamal Odwane hospital, the only one still operating in Gaza City, no longer has the means or infrastructure necessary to receive the wounded. In Rafah either, the hospitals no longer have resources. Many people died because they needed an antibiotic that was no longer available, or because of a lack of oxygen. Babies have died in incubators due to power outages.
The hypocrisy of parachute aid
Finally, there is the war of humiliation, which must be emphasized, and which is only getting worse. The humiliation of being killed under one's roof while sleeping, of looking for one's dead under the rubble, or of having to leave them under the rubble, as happened in Gaza City. People there were waiting for the redeployment of the army to fetch the buried victims, to bury them with dignity. We see dead people left and right in the streets. The humiliation of living in tents, the humiliation of food aid airdrops. It is not intended to help the inhabitants of Gaza, but just to public opinion in the imperialist countries, to say that we are helping Palestine and the Gazans. The humiliation of seeing people rush to collect these packages.
Countries like France, the United States and Jordan spend a lot of money to send these pallets by military planes, when they could send them by truck. There are now six or seven crossings between Israel and the Gaza Strip, in addition to the Rafah crossing. If the Israelis have given permission to use their airspace – because they consider Gaza part of their airspace – they can also give permission to let the trucks pass.
But they don't want to do it because they want to maintain this security disorder, where people end up fighting among themselves because there is no money. We come back to barter: I give you a bag of flour, you give me a bag of sugar.
Many are thinking of leaving. It is likely that if the Egyptians lowered the crossing fee a little – $5,000 per person – many Gazans would leave. Some sold all their possessions, their jewelry, their car, to raise this amount. Others who have nothing to sell create online prize pools.
This is a war of unlife. If it ends, a new one will begin, because there is nothing left to live on. No electricity, no kindergartens, no schools, no universities. There is nothing left in the Gaza Strip. Especially in Gaza City and the north. And that's the real war. It's being forced to make your family live in an empty, deserted place, where there is nothing at all.
The risks of widening the conflict; what is Israel looking for?
Our media have found a new scarecrow: Iran. Everyone spends their time condemning the missile and drone attack on the Zionist state. And that's simply because the Iranian state leaders hate Israel and want its destruction. This is what the official speech consists of.
And no one thinks to remind us of the Zionist strike against the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which caused the death of 7 people. Nobody tells us that Israel regularly sends missiles or drones to Lebanon or Syria. And it does not date from October 7, 2023, the colonial state has been practicing this for a long time, killing its neighbors with total impunity. Which Western imperialist states have condemned these abuses? To ask the question, is to answer it. Israel has “the right to defend itself”. Move along, nothing to see !
Beyond the Palestinian question, the conflict between Israel and Iran is part of the broader conflict between imperialist blocs, the West against China and Russia. A widening of the conflict would carry enormous risks.
And yet, this enlargement is what Israel is seeking. Even if the Zionists are blithely massacring the inhabitants of Gaza, they are in an impasse: Palestinian resistance is still alive and the people of the world are becoming more and more aware of the nature of their genocidal state. Without help from the United States, the occupying army would not last three days. And this military aid from Western imperialists is increasingly contested around the world.
So Israel has an interest in turning the eyes of the people of the world away from the Gaza Strip. To be able to calmly continue their genocide, Israeli leaders are thinking of widening the conflict, both so that there is less talk about Palestine, and to drag the United States into the war, because, clearly, their army is far away. to be as effective as they say against combatants. It kills many unarmed civilians, but does not eradicate Palestinian fighters. The focus on Palestine, even if it is very little present in Western media, would then cease altogether. This is the calculation of Netanyahu and his friends, who have an interest in prolonging the war.
In conclusion
The Communist Revolutionary Party has no illusions about Iran's stated support for the Palestinians' fight. There is an opportunism there which poorly hides imperialist ambitions on a regional scale.
Nevertheless, it is Israel which is the aggressor, it is Israel which violates the famous "international law" by bombing a consulate or by refusing access to humanitarian trucks in the Strip and more particularly in the north of Gaza.
The Palestinian question, the national liberation struggle of its people must remain the major concern of the people and workers of the world.
Under these conditions, if it is urgent and fundamental to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, as well as free access for humanitarian workers throughout the Gaza Strip, or even the total withdrawal of the occupying forces from the enclave, that cannot be enough.
This is why the Communist Revolutionary Party supports the fundamental demands of the Palestinian national liberation movement: an immediate end to Zionist military aggression, the right of refugees to return and the formation of a Palestinian state on the territory of Mandatory Palestine.