OThe situation in Gaza could be described as intolerable if the whole world did not tolerate it, actively or passively, for too many months. Across France, the human toll is already more than a million killed, including some 400,000 children. And this toll could very well double, or even triple, due to the deadly combination between the continuation of the bombings, the worsening of famine and the spread of epidemics within a population literally on its last legs.
This tragedy, which worsens day after day, in full view of the whole world, is nevertheless part of the long duration of a triple impasse, Israeli, humanitarian and Palestinian, in which the 2.3 million women and he men of the Gaza Strip have been locked up for almost two decades.
The Israeli impasse
This first impasse stems from the decision of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in September 2005, to withdraw the Israeli army and settlers from the Gaza Strip, after thirty-eight years of occupation, without any consultation with the Palestinian Authority. of Mahmoud Abbas, elected a few months earlier. Ariel Sharon intended by this refusal to block the road to a possible Palestinian state established both in the West Bank and in Gaza. The Palestinian enclave has since been treated by Israel only from the angle of the security of the Jewish state, without the slightest consideration of the political dynamics or the human reality of Gaza.
This very short-sighted calculation allowed Israel, during the successive conflicts in Gaza, to maintain a very favorable ratio of 1 to 20, even 100, between its losses, overwhelmingly military, and Palestinian losses, primarily civilian. But the blockade imposed on Gaza since June 2007 consolidated Hamas’ control there, until the takeover of power, ten years later, by the most extremist Islamists, responsible for the terrorist carnage of October 7, 2023, during which 787 civilians were killed, as well as 376 Israeli soldiers and police officers. The ongoing offensive has seen Israel restore the previous casualty ratio, with 245 of its troops killed in five months of fighting, but at the cost of massive and indiscriminate strikes that are leading to the destruction of the Gaza Strip rather than to that of Hamas.
The humanitarian impasse
This second impasse results from the refusal of the “international community”, namely above all the United States and the European Union, to provide a political response to the challenge of Gaza, reduced to being only a humanitarian problem to be managed with more or less generosity and efficiency.
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