Israeli Army Calculated Calorie Needs For Gazans To Stave Off Malnutrition During Blockade

[shira]

16. Nothing about controlling caloric intake there. Remember...

...Palestinians in a refugee camp bursting out in laughter at a reporter, telling him this isn't Darfur.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2010/08/gaza_is_not_darfur.html

GAZA CITY—Aid officials in Gaza all recite the same statistics: "44 percent unemployment [actually, 34%, we cannot expect a Slate reporter to actually check the facts, can we? -EoZ], 80 percent food-aid dependent, and 60 percent living on less than $2 a day." It sounds like a script they've grown tired of delivering to passing journalists.

After multiple rounds of similar briefings, I'm staring at Kamla Joudah's parlor in Nuseirat refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The warm beige tones of the furniture reflect the heat, and the walls gleam. The frequently cut power is on today, so the fan whirls. Tea and coffee are brought out on a small tray.

Kamla catches me appraising her home. "What are you looking at?" she asks, with some pique.
"Your house," I reply, "It's very nice."

She looks at me quizzically, "This is not Darfur," she snaps. The family members in the room burst out laughing as I blush.

The oft-recited statistics paint a bleak picture of life in the territory. But Gaza is a lot more complicated than the numbers suggest.

Comments like Kamla's are common here; everyone I speak to insists the coastal enclave is nothing like Somalia, Bangladesh, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. And people are indignant that I suggested it might be in the same league as those places.

They'd burst out laughing at you as well.

"There is food in Gaza. It's not a humanitarian crisis. There is no hunger, there is no starvation, but there is a crisis of another nature," says Mahmoud Daher, a World Health Organization official in Gaza, who was expressing his personal views, not those of his organization.

As Daher explains, the blockade has dramatically altered the standard of living for Palestinians in the territory. In three years, he assesses, Gazans have lost 20 years of economic development. And in that decline lies the root of the crisis in Gaza as he sees it.

"Inability to access quality care is a crisis, inability for people to produce and have access to jobs is a crisis, inability of people to get the quality of education that they are used to is a crisis, and above all a crisis of dignity—a crisis of humanity," Daher tells me.

Did you check the links to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as way back as 1993?

What was happening back then in 1993?

=======

Maybe you need to go back to the drawing board.

And again, if you guys are so worried about Palestinians (not that you are) one would think you'd bring up Egypt's role in this "blockade". With the Brotherhood in power, the Israeli "blockade" continues, even at the Gaza/Egypt border. The same Brotherhood you're supporting in Syria against Assad's forces.