Word: israelism
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...year after Israel launched its three-week offensive in Gaza that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and damaged or destroyed more than 50,000 homes in a campaign aimed at stopping Hamas rocket fire, the survivors are still living in rubble. And it is not for want of money that thousands of residents of the coastal enclave remain homeless this winter. Moved by the plight of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinians who were already reeling from a 2½-year economic siege imposed by Israel with help from Egypt and the U.S. even before Israel's air-and-ground...
...Relief officials estimate that Gaza needs 40,000 tons of cement and 25,000 tons of iron to start repairing the homes, hospitals, schools and shops destroyed during Israel's offensive. But so far, according to GISHA, an Israeli legal-rights group, the Israelis have allowed only 19 trucks carrying construction material into Gaza since the war ended last January. "You could say that Israel has bombed Gaza back into the mud age," says UNRWA's Gunness, "because that's what they're building their houses...
...factories have shut down, raising unemployment higher than 43%. With scarce sources of income, many Gazans would probably starve if not for food handouts from the U.N. and other agencies. More than 40,000 Gazans have no electricity; 10,000 have no running water in their homes; and because Israel bans entry of the spare parts needed to run Gaza's sewage-treatment plant, every day 87 million liters of sewage are dumped into the Mediterranean (which washes up on Israel's beaches too). (See pictures of the pain of loss in the Middle East...
...Although the international community occasionally protests Gaza's ongoing tragedy, so far no real pressure has been put on Israel to loosen its stranglehold. A senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government recently confided to a U.N. colleague that Israel's goal for Gaza was "no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis." The U.N. official interpreted that to mean that Israel would provide Gaza with an intravenous drip of relief to keep its 1.5 million inhabitants alive but just barely, in hopes that the people would overthrow the Hamas government they voted into power...
...only flicker of hope right now for a lifting of Israel's siege of Gaza is if Israel secures the return of Sergeant Gilad Shalit, who has been in Hamas captivity in Gaza since being snatched from the Israeli side of the boundary in the summer of 2006. Through Egyptian and German mediators, Hamas and Israel are negotiating a prisoner swap in which Shalit would be returned in exchange for the release of more than 900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, many of them convicted of terrorism. Israeli and Palestinian sources tell TIME that the deal now depends on resolving...