Can You Hear the Cries from Gaza?

No one seems to hear the cries from Gaza enough to act, despite the reports that talk about imminent economic collapse, dangerous food shortages, total aid dependency and impending humanitarian disaster. Neither the cries nor the reports appear in the headlines or news alerts in our mainstream media. And, while the statistics make shocking reading when they do emerge, it is the cries that we should be hearing because they come from people like us--real flesh and blood people who bleed, feel pain and grieve. They are the cries that give rise to the statistics, the cries of Palestinians no less human and no less vulnerable than any one of us would be as prisoners of Israel's merciless occupation.

For all the recent news about the infighting that has gripped internal Palestinian politics, there is no mistaking under whose suffocating matrix of control, the Palestinians are actually forced to live. Israel has threatened the Palestinians' right to exist on their own land since it was created and it has no more disengaged from Gaza than it has from the West Bank. Instead, Israel has made a prison of Gaza and completely sealed it off from the West Bank and the outside world. More...