Saving Gaza from a humanitarian catastrophe
LAST weekend, a maritime corridor for delivering aid to Gaza was scheduled to open. Food, medicines and other provisions will be shipped from Cyprus to the port of Gaza, a project initiated by Cyprus and backed by Western and Arab states, including the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.
The maritime corridor is the latest effort to bring in assistance to the Palestinian enclave, which is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The United Nations said at least 576,000 Palestinians, or a quarter of Gaza’s population, are facing famine.
Israel continues to severely limit aid deliveries by land, and last week, a mission to airdrop relief goods ended in tragedy after a package whose parachute failed crashed into a house, killing five people.
The sea corridor plan includes the US military building a temporary pier in Gaza to handle incoming aid shipments.
As the war between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas enters its sixth month, the situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate. Project HOPE reports that 2 million people live in “inhumane conditions,” struggling to stave off hunger amid power and water shortages and relentless fighting.
One Project HOPE official likened Gaza to “an open-air prison” where Palestinians
“cannot leave or seek asylum someplace else, and very few people can enter.”
The establishment of a maritime humanitarian corridor highlights the failure of the US and its Western allies to strongarm Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu into negotiating a truce with Hamas.
Last month, Netanyahu turned down as “delusional” an offer by Hamas for a fourmonth ceasefire that would have paved the way for the release of the remaining Hamas hostages in Gaza, the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from the Palestinian territory, and the signing of an agreement to end the conflict.
“Only total victory will allow us to restore security in Israel, both in the north and in the south,” Netanyahu had confidently declared.
For Michael Fakhri, a UN special rapporteur on the right to food, it is “absurd in a dark, cynical way” that the US was establishing a maritime corridor as a way around the land blockades set up by its ally, Israel.
There are reports that the peace talks, which have for weeks been dead in the water, were to be resuscitated Sunday, in time for the start of Ramadan, but the prospects of that happening remain unclear.
Many political observers, in fact, see the conflict spreading beyond Gaza and engulfing the entire Middle East.
Already, militia armies around the region, notably the Houthis in Yemen, expressing solidarity with Hamas, have, on their own, been attacking US targets.
Since November, the Houthis have been launching rocket and missile strikes against US warships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Commercial shipping has come under attack as well. Last week, two Filipinos were among the three crewmen of a commercial vessel killed by a Houthi missile.
In November, the same group took 12 Filipinos hostage after it seized a cargo ship in the Red Sea.
The attacks prompted the International Bargaining Forum to declare the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden high-risk areas.
Because shipping has been disrupted in one of the world’s busiest sea routes, container trade between Asia and Europe and the US has plummeted by 85 percent, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. Port calls in the Philippines have been delayed, resulting in higher freight costs.
The disruption will derail the country’s growth track, the EIU projected. The safety of its seafarers and the economic fallout are compelling reasons for the Philippines to join the international call to end the fighting in Gaza. The Department of Foreign Affairs has maintained that the government “remains steadfast in the belief that through diplomacy and adherence to international law, the inter-related conflicts affecting the [Middle East] region will eventually be resolved…”
All efforts must now be focused on breaking the impasse in negotiations. There are no other viable options left.
“The safety of its seafarers and the economic fallout from the conflict are compelling reasons for the Philippines to join the international call to end the fighting in Gaza.