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The brutal reality in Gaza

Palestinians in Gaza got a now familiar Christmas present in the form of death rained from above by Israel.

Palestinians in Gaza got a now familiar Christmas present in the form of death rained from above by Israel.

Toddler Hala Abu Sbeikhah was killed by a tank shell as she played in the yard of her refugee camp home.

At two years and eight months her existence had already been defined by the jail in which the entire Gazan population is forced to live.

Her home was 500 metres from the militarised prison fence which completely encircles 1.65 million people living 11,000 per square mile.

A third of the strip's agricultural land is located within Israel's self-declared military buffer zone, where entry means death.

Ironically the Christmas Eve shelling was in response to the shooting of Israeli Bedouin contractor Salah Shukri Abu Latyef, who was working to repair this cage that imprisons the Gazan population, for whom unemployment stands at 32 per cent.

The Bedouin population in the Negev is also on the receiving end of Israel's racial policies, living in a handful of "recognised" population centres or in dozens of other historic villages that are deemed by Tel Aviv not to exist, left without infrastructure, and now facing clearances to make way for Israeli settlements.

Up to 40,000 people are to be shunted from their traditional homes as a result.

But with 66 per cent of Bedouin living below the poverty line, rising to an estimated 80 per cent in "unrecognised" villages, jobs assisting the Israeli security apparatus remain one of the few routes of escape.

The Popular Resistance Committees, not linked to Gaza's Hamas government nor presumably acting on the orders of young Hala, claimed responsibility for the Bedouin's killing.

Yet Defence Minister Moshe Ya'alon, whose government is pursuing the Negev ethnic cleansing policy, pounced on news of Abu Latyef's death to blame Hamas as the "sovereign" power responsible.

"We will respond aggressively and painfully to any attack on our authority and against our civilians and soldiers," he declared.

This depiction of Hamas as a sovereign power responsible for the attacks by proxy is easily undermined.

Israel's Christmas onslaught didn't stop at missiles.

Tel Aviv also shut the lifeline Kerem Shalom crossing, in one fell swoop cutting supplies to the strip's only power station.

It fell silent yesterday, 12 days after it was switched back on following a seven-week shutdown caused by fuel shortages.

Gazans were told that power supplies would again be halved from 12 hours a day to six hours.

Such collective punishment by an occupying power is illegal under international law. But then, despite wielding a total economic and military stranglehold over the Gaza Strip, and able to strike with impunity, Israel argues that Gaza is technically not "occupied."

The Gaza shelling followed an attempted Tel Aviv bus bombing, the stabbing of a member of Israel's West Bank occupation police force, and a single home-made rocket fired at southern Israel.

Defence Minister Moshe Ya'alon blamed the Palestinian Authority for inciting hatred that drove shadowy "individual attackers" to carry out these attacks.

In his Alice in Wonderland view, Tel Aviv's announcement of a fresh wave of illegal settlement-building, on top of military strikes, mass imprisonment without trial, repeated raids, prison walls, land grabs and a total economic stranglehold, is nowhere to be seen.

In the past week alone Israeli army raids have invaded swathes of the West Bank - Ramallah, Bethlehem, Qalandia, Nablus and Hebron among them - kicked down doors and dragged off dozens of men.

On Boxing Day Israeli army bulldozers in Qalqilya uprooted almond, citrus and olive trees next to the apartheid wall encircling its growing settlements.

Mr Ya'alon and his colleagues can try as hard as they like to blame "hateful" Palestinians for sporadic backlashes against this relentless brutality.

But international civil society increasingly understands the situation as it really is.

 

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