Road trip Gaza!

From Atlas

Road trip Gaza!

More on what I have been following for months. The abundance of food and other goods in Gaza is mind blowing. Perhaps that's why Hamas is refusing all humanitarian shipments -- they have nowhere to put it. Stuffed.

This is a propaganda war -- and the information battle space is the front, and big media is aligned with the jihad force.

Charles Krauthammer last night on FOX:

The fundamental deception here is the use of the word “humanitarian.” As we saw, humanitarians don’t wield iron clubs and would have killed the Israelis had the Israelis not drawn their pistols in self-defense. But there’s a larger issue here. What exactly is the humanitarian crisis that the flotilla was actually addressing? There is none. There’s no one starving in Gaza. The Gazans have been supplied with food and social services, education, by the U.N., by UNRWA, for 60 years in part with American tax money. Second, when there are humanitarian needs, the Israelis allow every day food and medicine overland into Gaza.

The reason that it did not want to allow this flotilla is because, as the spokesman for the flotilla said herself, this was not about humanitarian relief, it was about breaking the blockade. And the reason the Israelis have a blockade is because they only want to allow humanitarian supplies and not weaponry. Look, the proof of that is the fact that if you look at a map of Gaza, you’ll see that Israelis only control three sides of this rectangle. There’s a fourth side on the Egyptian side. So it is an Egyptian-Israeli blockade. The Egyptians have the same problem with Gaza. People accuse Israelis of having a blockade because they’re racist, they’re anti-Muslim, anti-Arab. The Egyptians are Muslim and Arab, and they’ve gone to war three times on behalf of the Palestinians.

So why do they have exactly the same blockade? Because Gaza is run by Hamas, a terror entity that wants to import weaponry and resume the war against Israel. The man who made the announcement that we saw earlier, explaining the commando raid, is the defense minister of Israel. He’s not right winger. He’s Ehud Barak, who’s the leader of Labor, the party of Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, the party of the left, the man who 10 years ago this summer offered the Palestinians a peace agreement that would provide a Palestinian state, division of Jerusalem and an end of the conflict. The Palestinians said no, and Gaza two years ago declared war on Israel. That’s why you’ve got a blockade, and the flotilla was not about humanitarian needs. It was about smashing the blockade. /p>

Here's a report for a Danish Newspaper over at Elders of Zion: Danish reporter Steffen Jensen visits Gaza to see how bad things are, given that the entire world is in an uproar over the humanitarian crisis there (translated):

GAZA (01/06/2010): After some media to judge, the situation in Gaza, desperate, everything is about to collapse, the community is on the brink or at the level of the third world.

Judging from the media, the situation in Gaza is desperate, everything is about to collapse, and the community is on the brink or at the level of a third world country.

The Palestinian community's immediate downfall has been prophesied numerous times in the media. People have nothing to eat, we sometimes know. The UN must from time to time to stop food distribution, either because their stocks are running low, or because they can not get diesel for their trucks, and therefore can not carry food in. And so on.

This time, I had expected to see real suffering, because with all the fuss in recent days about bringing tons of humanitarian relief in - so much that people actually sacrificed their lives for it - there certainly had to really be a deep, desperate situation in the Gaza Strip. No food. Long queues in front of UN food stocks. Hungry children with food bowls.

But this was not the picture that greeted me.

When I yesterday morning drove through Gaza City, I was immediately surprised that there are almost as many traffic jams as there always has been. Is there not a shortage of fuel? Apparently not. Gasoline is not even rationed.

Many shops were closed yesterday, Hamas has declared a general strike in protest against Israel's brutal and deadly attack on the Turkish flotilla with pro-Palestinian activists on board. So it was difficult to estimate how many products were on the shelves. Therefore I went over to the Shati refugee camp, also known as Beach Camp. Here is one of Gaza's many vegetable markets that sell much more than just fruits and vegetables.

I will not say whether, in better times has been a larger product range than there was yesterday. But there was certainly no shortage of vegetables, fruits or any other ordinary, basic foods. Tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, watermelons, potatoes - mountains of these items in the many stalls.

I must admit I was a little surprised. Because when I call down here to my Palestinian friends, they tell me about all the problems and deficiencies, so I expected that the crisis was a little more clear.

[...]

"We have nothing," she said. We need everything! Food, drinks ... everything! "

It disturbed her not at least that she stood between the mountains of vegetables, fruit, eggs, poultry and fish, while she spun this doomsday scenario.

Yousuf al-Assad Yazgy owns a fruit and vegetable outlet here in the market. All his fruit is imported from Israel.

"Not all fruit and all vegetables come from Israel. Ours does. They come from Israel. But in the Gaza Strip there is not very much fruit cultivated. Mostly tomatoes, potatoes and vegetables. So here with me are the vegetables and watermelon were from Gaza. All the fruit comes across the border from Israel," he explains, but also says that there can be long periods when the border is closed, and which therefore fruit does not come in.

Read it all.