Don’t look. There are no Gazan footballers on the World Cup stadiums, nor any cyclists from Gaza on the slopes of the Tour de France. And we won’t hear any of their voices during the future edition of Eurovision. The people of Gaza are disappearing from our radar. Everything happens as if he had fallen into a hole in history. The journalistic blockade imposed by the Israeli authorities, without equivalent on the surface of the globe, except in the worst dictatorships, has cut them off from the rest of the world.
What we know about the situation of the more than 2 million inhabitants, crowded into a piece of confetti, barely 40% of the 45 km2 of the original Gaza Strip, is meager but sufficient. Reports from UN agencies, words from humanitarians and some testimonies collected converge to depict a humanly untenable situation. For more than a thousand days, the population, caught between Hamas abuses and Israeli bombings, has lived under the constraint of three major combined insecurities: military, food and health.
28% of victims are children
One point arouses indignation more than any other, the deaths of children: 28% of victims, according to estimates. The term genocide, used more and more, is perhaps not legally constituted according to the criteria of international justice but the situation on the spot bears its characteristics. Like a tree falling when it is sawn at the base, this is the future of Gaza if nothing changes, and quickly.
However, in Khan Younes as in Jabaliya, time does not pass; he is arrested. Gazans know better than anyone that there is no viable plan to get them out of their plight. Escape by road, sea or air is impossible for them. All they would have left was the possibility of escaping through dreams. Even that is forbidden to them today.
