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href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/why-un-pushing-gazas-surrender">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/why-un-pushing-gazas-surrender</a>
<h1 id="reader-title">Why is UN pushing for Gaza's surrender?</h1>
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/maureen-clare-murphy">Maureen
Clare Murphy</a></span> <span class="field field-blog"></span><span
class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2017-07-20T18:03:04+00:00">20 July 2017</span></span>
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<p><a
href="https://unsco.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/gaza_10_years_later_-_11_july_2017.pdf">The
new report on Gaza</a> by a team led by Robert
Piper, the United Nations’ chief humanitarian
coordinator in Palestine, makes for disturbing
reading.</p>
<p>That’s not only because of the alarming statistics or
“indicators” about the humanitarian catastrophe in
Gaza, of which there is no shortage in the report.</p>
<p>That the situation in Gaza is untenable, its
population living in a pressure cooker that gets worse
by the day, is clear to anyone who pays attention.</p>
<p>The UN has <a
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-gaza-un-idUSBRE87Q0OE20120827">previously
predicted</a> that Gaza would become “unlivable” by
the year 2020.</p>
<p>Piper’s report “tries to look past the polemic and
review – as we approach 2020 – the socioeconomic,
humanitarian and human rights disaster that is
unfolding in Gaza and to advocate on behalf of the two
million people trapped in this sad reality.”</p>
<h2>Pushing for Gaza’s surrender</h2>
<p>Yet what the report actually does is reveal how the
UN has apparently aligned with Israel and its
international backers in pushing for Gaza’s total
surrender to its tormentors.</p>
<p>This is made evident with the background context
provided in the report which frames Israel’s economic
blockade on Gaza as the response to Hamas’ takeover of
the Gaza Strip in 2007, which Piper’s report
perversely describes as a “coup.”</p>
<p>Hamas was the unexpected winner in the 2006
Palestinian legislative elections held in the West
Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.</p>
<p><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-papers-and-gaza-coup/9200">Investigative
reporting by David Rose in <em>Vanity Fair</em> and
a trove of leaked documents revealed by Al Frazer</a>
describe a 2007 coup attempt in Gaza, but not by
Hamas.</p>
<p>Following Hamas’ victory at the ballot box, Israel
and its allies, principally the United States, spared
no effort in undermining the new Hamas-led Palestinian
Authority government with the goal of restoring power
exclusively to Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based PA
president whose Fatah party lost the election.</p>
<p>After months of street fighting, Hamas and Fatah
formed a “national unity government” headed by a Hamas
prime minister. The US then enlisted Fatah strongman <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/muhammad-dahlan">Muhammad
Dahlan</a> to rout Hamas militarily in Gaza. This
plot ultimately failed, and Dahlan’s US-backed
militias were run out of the territory.</p>
<p>According to the anodyne language used in the Piper
report, Hamas’ subsequent administration of Gaza is
deemed illegitimate because of its refusal “to
recognize the Middle East Quartet’s (EU, Russian
Federation, UN and US) demands to accept all previous
agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist and
renounce violence.”</p>
<p>In other words, the preference of Palestinian voters
living under Israeli occupation is null and void
because Hamas does not subscribe to the normalization
program – including the requirement for <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/security-coordination">active
cooperation</a> with Israeli occupation forces –
imposed by Israel and its international allies, in
contrast to the subservient role played by Abbas’
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.</p>
<p>This is the fundamental, irreconcilable political
difference between the American and European-backed
Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The impasse has
compounded the socioeconomic deterioration in Gaza
resulting from Israel’s decade-long siege and
half-century of military occupation.</p>
<h2>“Right to exist”</h2>
<p>The Piper report’s insistence on Hamas’ recognition
of Israel’s “right to exist” and the demand that it
“renounce violence” should be further scrutinized.</p>
<p>Why should Palestinians be forced to submit to
demands that <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29abunimah.html">Israel
itself rejects</a>?</p>
<p>Only on planet Peace Process would a resistance
faction be demanded to <a
href="https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/reclaiming-self-determination/">recognize
an occupying state’s “right to exist,”</a> while
that same occupier has historically violated the
Palestinian people’s very right to life, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/video-gazas-gaping-wound">wiping
out families by the dozens</a> and <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-many-bombs-has-israel-dropped-gaza">killing
more than one out of every thousand of Gaza’s
residents</a> during its onslaught in the summer of
2014.</p>
<p>Israel violates Palestinians’ right to life so
routinely that the weekly <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/year-atrocities-palestine">extrajudicial
executions</a> perpetrated by its forces go largely
unreported by the mainstream corporate media. Israel
is not held accountable for its systematic and daily
violations of Palestinians’ most basic rights.</p>
<p>When Palestinians do use violent resistance against
Israeli occupation forces, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-uns-ban-ki-moon-and-oxfam-undermine-palestinian-right-resist">as
is their right under international law</a>, it has
been characterized as “terror,” even by <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/police-assailants-killed-jerusalem-attack-youth-slain-raid">UN
officials</a>.</p>
<p>The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights has in the past <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-un-telling-palestinians-protect-their-occupiers">bizarrely
called on</a> “Palestinian authorities to take all
feasible measures to prevent attacks on Israelis,”
lumping in attacks on civilians with those against
occupation forces and suggesting that Palestinians
have no right to defend themselves against Israel’s
threats to their very existence.</p>
<p>In the Piper report, Hamas’ military capacities are
blamed for impeding access and movement of people and
goods to and from Gaza, particularly “the development,
stockpiling and firing of rockets capable of reaching
deep into Israel and the construction of sophisticated
tunnels used for kidnappings and terrorist attacks in
Israel.”</p>
<p>In the report’s timeline of the siege, the first
phase is portrayed as a response to the capture (<a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/focus/2010/06/2010628132553801841.html">misconstrued</a>
as a “kidnapping”) of an Israeli soldier by Hamas in
2006.</p>
<p>Israel’s winter 2008-2009 military onslaught in Gaza
is not mentioned in the timeline, and the 2012 and
2014 assaults only in passing. But the number of
rockets fired from Gaza is given with precise figures
during each phase of the siege, while regular Israeli
airstrikes, shelling and gunfire on the territory are
not mentioned in the timeline.</p>
<p>Nor does the timeline mention Israel’s <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-kanwisher/reigniting-violence-how-d_b_155611.html">habitual</a>
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ben-white/numbers-speak-themselves">violations</a>
of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/infographic-who-violates-ceasefires-more-israelis-or-palestinians">negotiated
ceasefires</a> that had drastically reduced levels
of violence.</p>
<p>The omission of Israel’s regular strikes on Gaza, and
the inclusion of the number of mortars fired from
Gaza, reinforces the lie that each of Israel’s massive
military assaults in <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-fabricated-rocket-crisis/7927">2008</a>,
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-israel-shattered-gaza-truce-leading-escalating-death-and-tragedy-timeline">2012</a>
and <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/max-blumenthals-unflinching-book-gaza-war-must-not-be-ignored/14615">2014</a>
were justified responses to rocket fire, rather than
Israeli violations of truces followed in good faith by
Hamas.</p>
<h2>“Terror”</h2>
<p>And as for those tunnels, Piper’s report describes
them as being used for “terror.” Yet the UN’s own
independent inquiry into the 2014 war on Gaza <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/balance-un-gaza-report-cant-hide-massive-israeli-war-crimes">states
explicitly</a> that tunnels were used by Palestinian
groups to conduct attacks only on “legitimate military
targets.”</p>
<p>The Piper report is one of many from international
agencies and human rights groups expressing concern
over and demanding unspecified international action to
improve the current situation in Gaza.</p>
<p>Like every other report before, it will be ignored by
world powers that view Palestinians in Gaza – most of
them refugees from the lands on which Israel declared
its state, and nearly half of them under the age of 15
– as surplus and expendable.</p>
<p>What is significant about the Piper report is that it
demonstrates that the UN – which brokered a <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/un-database-gaza-aid-may-give-israel-targets-attack-secret-memo">secretive
and illegal system that gives Israel ultimate
control</a> over the rebuilding of homes and other
civilian infrastructure it destroyed in Gaza, allowing
it to <a
href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/development-policy/news/eu-source-gaza-reconstruction-aid-is-made-in-israel/">profit</a>
from the reconstruction <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/who-benefits-billions-pledged-gaza-reconstruction">paid
for</a> by third-party states – has totally
capitulated to Gaza’s oppressors.</p>
<p>Reading between the lines of Piper’s report, one
understands that Israel controls everything that gets
into Gaza, and everything that gets out. It has a
total chokehold on Gaza’s economy, whatever remains of
it after Israel <a
href="https://unispal.un.org/pdfs/QuarRep_GazaEconRpt.pdf">destroyed
or damaged 250 factories and 300 businesses in the
summer of 2014 alone</a>.</p>
<h2>Genocidal aims</h2>
<p>The Piper report obscures the reality that the
devastating siege on Gaza is a willful strategy to
bring its population to their knees. It makes no
mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal aims to <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/israel-s-minister-of-incitement-1.479125">“send
Gaza back to the Middle Ages,”</a> their claims that
<a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/michael-ben-ari-bugbear-of-the-left.premium-1.493375">“there
are no innocents in Gaza … mow them down,”</a> their
calls to <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/concentrate-and-exterminate-israel-parliament-deputy-speakers-gaza-genocide-plan">“concentrate”
and “exterminate”</a> Palestinians, or their demands
to <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes">slaughter
Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little
snakes.”</a></p>
<p>In Gaza, Israel aims to snuff out the last bastion of
Palestinian resistance against its settler-colonial
project, an endeavor that <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/gaza-massacre-price-jewish-state">requires
massive, genocidal violence to be maintained</a>.</p>
<p>Detached from this reality, the outcomes of Israel’s
calculated policy are treated by the Piper report as
technical problems to be dealt with by international
development groups – groups that would not be needed
if there was real pressure to end the siege, to end
the occupation, to secure Palestinians’ right to
self-determination.</p>
<p>In many instances in the report, damage to civilian
infrastructure such as schools and medical facilities
is passively described as having been incurred “during
successive rounds of hostilities,” obscuring the fact
that they were systematically targeted by Israel’s
sophisticated air force.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a false parity between the Israeli
military, massively subsidized by the US and supported
by EU members, and Hamas’ guerrilla fighters is
reinforced throughout the report, including in the
discussion of war crimes in Gaza.</p>
<p>The Piper report even says that “The State of
Palestine is also responsible for implementing its
human rights obligations in the entirety of the oPt,
including Gaza,” using the insufferable jargon
employed by international agencies for the occupied
West Bank and Gaza Strip.</p>
<p>There is no State of Palestine – a reality the report
concedes elsewhere when it refers to “the future state
of Palestine.”</p>
<p>There is only a quisling Palestinian Authority
government in the West Bank with extremely limited
autonomy and which doesn’t even have the authority to
build a school in the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israeli-home-demolitions-break-records-shatter-lives-2016">60
percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military
control</a>. It is only there to <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/mahmoud-abbas-collaboration-israeli-army-secret-police-sacred">serve
as an enforcement arm of Israel’s occupation</a> and
to try to <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-mahmoud-abbas-letting-children-die-gaza">break
Palestinian resistance</a>.</p>
<p>Yet the Piper report laments that “the Strip remains
beyond the reach of the legitimate Palestinian
Authorities and under Hamas control.”</p>
<p>The catastrophe in Gaza is not caused by acts of
nature, it is one of careful design and control. The
situation born of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-experiment-human-despair/6071">Israel’s
experiment in human despair in Gaza</a> will never
improve so long as the genocidal state behind it is
whitewashed and appeased by the very institutions that
are supposed to hold it accountable.</p>
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