Gaza 2020: Has the Palestinian territory reached the point of no return?
In 2012, a United Nations report painted a bleak picture of the Gaza
Strip and the conditions facing its Palestinian inhabitants.
Its economy was sluggish, its healthcare system beleaguered and its natural resources dwindling.
But darker days were to come, the UN predicted.
By 2020, Gaza’s population would surpass two million. Peak demand for
electricity would soar by more than 50 percent, the report projected,
and the territory’s coastal aquifer could be damaged beyond repair. The
UN called for a massive injection of resources, including thousands more
doctors and nurses, a doubling of electricity capacity and at least 440
new schools.
It is now almost 2020. The UN’s projections about Gaza’s ballooning demands have proven largely accurate – but the
delivery of essential services has failed to catch up.
Unemployment has reached nearly 50 percent,
the per-person ratio of doctors and nurses has dropped, more than
two-thirds of households are food insecure, and just three percent of
Gaza’s aquifer water is safe to drink, according to official statistics
and aid agencies.
Michael Lynk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told MEE: “
The prediction of unliveability has already arrived.
The common measuring stick used by the UN or any other international
organisation to be able to evaluate how people live is human dignity,
and Gaza has been without human dignity for years now.”
Surviving in Gaza
Since Hamas rose to power in Gaza in 2007,
Israel has blockaded the coastal enclave, with severe restrictions on the movement of people and goods.
Fuel shortages, power cuts, contaminated water and crumbling
infrastructure have been compounded by repeated Israeli offensives. The
most recent war, in the summer of 2014, killed more than 2,200
Palestinians and devastated tens of thousands of homes.
During the early years of the siege, Israel calculated the minimum
number of calories that Palestinians in Gaza would need to survive (the
information came to light following a successful legal fight by the
Israeli NGO Gisha). These figures were then used to determine how much
food aid should be trucked in, essentially keeping the territory on life
support.
“
It was going to keep Gaza hungry but not starving, and that continues to be … the Israeli strategy towards this,” Lynk said.
“As long as Gaza doesn’t revolt; as long as there isn’t another
periodic pounding of Gaza, using among the most sophisticated armaments
that the world has; as long as Gaza stays off headlines in the world,
the world is not going to do very much to change this.”
Haidar Eid, an associate professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza,
described Israel’s policy towards Palestinians in the enclave as
“genocidal”.
“They are a constant reminder of the original sin committed in 1948,”
Eid told MEE, referencing the Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians
that accompanied Israel’s founding. “Israel wants to punish them for
their resistance, for not being subservient subjects, and make them give
up on their internationally guaranteed right of return.”
Decline for Palestinians
Other observers have noted how, long before the 2020 deadline, the
Israeli siege had already produced untenable conditions throughout Gaza.
Restrictions on fishing zones – reduced to 10 nautical miles from 15
earlier this year – impede people’s livelihoods. Import bans prevent
critical goods, such as fuel and cooking gas, from entering the
territory. And routine blackouts make daily life a struggle, with power
sometimes available for just a few hours a day.
For some of the hardest-hit Palestinians, relief is impossible. This
past September, Israel approved fewer than two-thirds of applications
for patients to leave the territory for medical reasons. Some were
interrogated as a prerequisite for permit approval – a practice
denounced by human rights groups, such as Physicians for Human Rights,
who point to Israel’s history of coercing patients into becoming
collaborators in exchange for needed hospital care.
The “de-development” of health services means that basic technology
often isn’t available in Gaza, while drugs and medical personnel are in
short supply, noted Gerald Rockenschaub, head of the World Health
Organization’s office for the occupied Palestinian territories.
“It’s not an abrupt decline; it’s a chronic decline,” he told MEE.
“The system is always very close or on the brink of collapse.”
International aid to the densely populated territory, while
preventing a total shutdown, has created humanitarian dependence rather
than fostering development in Gaza, experts note. At the same time,
funding cuts this year by the Trump administration to UNRWA, the UN
agency for Palestinian refugees, have deepened the crisis.
“There is a development abyss in the Gaza context,” Jamie McGoldrick,
the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian
territories, told MEE, noting that it has been felt acutely in the
health and education sectors.
Schools are running double – and even triple – shifts to accommodate
the growing youth population. Meanwhile, hospitals have been stretched
beyond their capacity, especially as the Great March of Return protests,
which began in 2018, have resulted in thousands of injuries.
Yet, while humanitarian assistance is little more than a quick-fix
solution, analysts say, weaning the territory off of this aid will be a
complex and difficult process.
“You can’t just say, ‘OK, tomorrow no more food, no more support. You
go elsewhere.’ There is no ‘elsewhere’ in Gaza … People are dependent
on humanitarian [aid],” McGoldrick said.
“We have to switch that to something which is more sustainable, and
certainly something much more dignified than what we have right now.”
Palestinians: ‘Alive for lack of death’
Kamel Hawwash, a British-Palestinian professor based at the
University of Birmingham, told MEE that to the people of Gaza, the UN’s
2020 prediction has long since come true. He said that many cite the
Arabic saying: “We are alive for lack of death.”
Israel’s policy is one of containment, Hawwash said, and at the end
of the day, “Israel wants to keep ‘quiet’ in Gaza. If Hamas provides it,
then fine. If it doesn’t, then [Israel] attacks the strip.”
Israel has also reportedly been encouraging Palestinians to leave
Gaza permanently, aiming to further reduce their presence on the ground.
Earlier this year, a government source reportedly acknowledged that
“attempts have been made” to persuade other nations to take them in,
adding that Israel would assist with transportation.
For Gaza to emerge from its current predicament, Hawwash said, the
intra-Palestinian rift between Fatah and Hamas must be mended and the
Israeli siege must end, allowing stability to take root.
“Clearly, if the refugees who make up 80 percent of the population
were to return to their homes – as they are entitled under international
law – then Gaza could be liveable and prosper.”
A successful political process could pave the way for a more
development-oriented strategy in Gaza, McGoldrick said, potentially
attracting new investments in water-supply systems, industrial zones and
job creation.
He called the blockade “the biggest inhibitor to development” while
acknowledging that the 2020 deadline of unliveability was in itself “an
artificial creation” of the UN.
“That doesn’t mean anything to any Palestinian … People are just trying to get through the day, surviving day by day,” he said.
Yet, with the continuing population growth, service reduction and
soaring unemployment, Gaza may be approaching a point of no return.
Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard University’s Center
for Middle Eastern Studies, told MEE: “The term ‘unliveable’ … is meant
as an alarm bell for the international community, but that bell has been
ringing for a long time.”
The warning, she said, has been ignored amid international
indifference and humanitarian interventions that merely serve as a
substitute for human rights.
“Without the unencumbered movement of people and goods,” Roy said, “Gaza will be condemned to continued ruination.”
