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...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

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...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby repulsewarrior » Thu Sep 03, 2015 3:37 am

Quote:
In their new joint report, the coalition - comprising Amnesty International, CARE International UK, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Médecins du Monde UK, Oxfam, Save The Children UK and Trócaire - warns that Israel's blockade of Gaza is a collective punishment of the entire Gazan civilian population of 1.5 million. The report concludes that the Israeli government's policy of blockade is unacceptable, illegal and fails to deliver security for Palestinians and Israelis alike.


http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db9 ... enDocument

Quote:
40-50 million litres of sewage continues to pour into the sea daily (Oxfam, 2008).


Quote:
95% of Gaza's industrial operations are suspended due to the ban on imported raw materials and the block on exports (World Bank, 2007).


Quote:
Christian Aid's Director, Daleep Mukarji, said:

"The UK government should acknowledge that a new strategy is needed for Gaza. The current policy does not secure vital security for Israeli citizens, and even if it did the blockade policy would still be unacceptable and illegal. Humanitarian aid can help stave off total collapse but it will not provide a long-term solution. Gaza cannot become a partner for peace unless Israel, Fatah and the Quartet engage with Hamas and give the people of Gaza a future."


...this was March, 2008, the worst Humanitarian crisis since 1967.

UN: Gaza could become 'uninhabitable' by 2020

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2 ... -2020.html

Socio-economic conditions in Gaza today are currently "at their lowest point since 1967," when Israel seized the territory from Egypt in its Six-Day War, according to the report.

The report estimated that the three military operations, including last year's devastating war that killed some 2,200 Palestinians and displaced half a million more, had caused economic losses close to three times the size of Gaza's gross domestic product.

The 2014 war, which also killed 73 Israelis, destroyed or severely damaged more than 20,000 Palestinian homes, 148 schools, 15 hospitals and 45 primary health care centers, UNCTAD said.


...today.
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby Lordo » Thu Sep 03, 2015 9:23 am

this is the shame of the un and international community that cant even bring itself to condemn israel. un is not fit for purpose. it is time for a real un with full democracy rather than the toy of 5 nations.
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby kurupetos » Thu Sep 03, 2015 10:37 am

Lordo wrote:this is the shame of the un and international community that cant even bring itself to condemn israel. un is not fit for purpose. it is time for a real un with full democracy rather than the toy of 5 nations.

:idea: I think Terggy should organise a peace operation to Israel. :mrgreen:
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby repulsewarrior » Thu Sep 03, 2015 4:22 pm

...and it is not the worst crisis today, Syria is.

indeed, it may not be a matter of enough guns, but not enough butter, there does seem to be an over reliance on military solutions, having worked (so well) in the past.
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby GreekIslandGirl » Thu Sep 03, 2015 4:50 pm

This is the crisis that concerns me the most:

A tale of two crises in Greece – coping with economic depression and refugees

Daniel Howden

Thursday 3 September 2015

The focus has been on harrowing images from the Turkish shore of a drowned toddler and from the Greek shore of tearful parents clutching their children. What the tens of thousands of Syrians who survived the crossing have in common is that they have landed in the midst of other people’s holidays and another nation’s crisis.

They have found Greeks who have their own reasons to feel hopeless and exhausted. They are in the sixth year of the deepest recession ever witnessed by a developed economy. After eight months of fractious negotiations, brinkmanship and all-night summits there has been no easing in the terms demanded by the rest of Europe for keeping debt-laden Greece afloat. The prescription of deepening austerity in return for the financial aid the country needs to finance its debts and remain in the euro is unchanged.

The foreseeable future is one of even greater unemployment, deeper recession and political instability. Alexis Tsipras, the man who became prime minister by insisting that Europe must address what he called a “humanitarian crisis” in Greece, has resigned. His hyperbole won him office, but nothing in the way of concessions from the eurozone. He now waits to see whether he will be re-elected on 20 September.

For Greeks weary of their own troubles there has been no summer hiding place from the scale of the influx
No one should doubt the severity of the Greek depression, arguably the worst peacetime crisis that a developed nation has faced. Its poisonous effects can be traced in everything from suicide rates and homelessness to child poverty and support for political extremes. But neither should they confuse it with what is unfolding in Syria or Iraq or Libya or Eritrea, whose people are also making for Europe. The displacement of half of Syria’s 22 million population amounts to the worst refugee crisis since the second world war. This is a humanitarian crisis.

One of the peculiarities of this August has been the alignment of these crises. High season for the Greeks themselves is usually stretched more leisurely over July and August. This year the imposition of capital controls and the fear of Grexit has shrunk it to a few weeks, leading to a crush even on the islands that receive fewer foreign tourists.

On islands closer to Athens, such as Tinos, where tourism is overwhelmingly Greek, high summer earnings are essential to survive the lean winters. It has left locals to bemoan a “relentless August”, which had the capacity to exhaust but not to fully compensate for weeks and months of income lost to political deadlock.

Leros: The tiny Greek island sinking under Europe’s migration crisis

On the islands closest to Turkey, such as Chios, Samos, Kos and Lesbos, where 33,000 migrants have arrived in the last month alone, the two phenomena have played out simultaneously. In Chios Town, the island’s capital, Greeks queuing at cashpoints due to continuing caps on withdrawals, have watched far longer lines of refugees at the mobile phone stores, anxious to get a sim card and let loved ones know that they have survived the passage to Europe.

For Greeks weary of their own troubles there has been no summer hiding place from the scale of the influx. Inevitably, there are some who have taken advantage of the situation. On Chios, sharp operators have been going to the most popular landing sites and gathering up discarded lifejackets and the outboard engines from abandoned dinghies, which they then resell to smugglers across the water in Turkey.

Others, like the baker on Lesbos who signed on to feed a few hundred migrants on a government contract and has found himself months later unpaid and feeding more than 8,000 refugees have shown great patience. A handful of people such as Sandra Tsiligeridu and her friends, whose day trip to a small islet off Kos on a speedboat turned into a drama when they rescued a Syrian man who had been adrift in the water for 13 hours, have responded with great humanity.


Meanwhile images of refugees from a horrific civil war wandering into the background of Europeans’ holiday snaps have proven darkly fascinating. In a sense, the juxtaposition of sunburnt tourists on loungers with sodden, desperate refugees arriving from Syria recalls some of the early images from the surge of piracy in 2008 off the coast of East Africa.

Then it was ragtag Somali pirates hijacking holiday yachts and stalking cruise ships that provided startling footage. Not that Syrian refugees pose any physical threat to anyone, but their arrival in such numbers is one of those jarring moments where the wreckage of failed states, civil wars and the sum of human misery penetrates the bubble in which much of the developed world lives.

The dividing line in people’s response to the human traffic is most often drawn between those who acknowledge the people on the move as refugees and those intent on grumbling about illegal immigrants.

For now the Eleftherios Venizelos, a passenger ferry named after Greece’s greatest statesman, has been pressed into service to transport undocumented foreigners from the islands to the mainland. It was Venizelos who as prime minister oversaw one of the world’s most harrowing population exchanges in 1922 in the wake of a disastrous war between Greece and Turkey that forced millions of people to abandon their homes and countries. Once again there are refugee ships crisscrossing the Aegean and anyone with a sense of history should stop calling it a migrant crisis.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ration-kos
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby Get Real! » Thu Sep 03, 2015 4:57 pm

GreekIslandGirl wrote:This is the crisis that concerns me the most:

Then why didn’t you start your own thread instead of trying to drown the dire plight of Gaza? :?

Surely you didn’t think that Greeks are in a worse situation than Gazans??? :?

You really need to start using that pea in your head… (I’m aware you assume it’s a plum) :-|
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby GreekIslandGirl » Thu Sep 03, 2015 5:01 pm

Get Real! wrote:
GreekIslandGirl wrote:This is the crisis that concerns me the most:

Then why didn’t you start your own thread instead of trying to drown the dire plight of Gaza? :?

Surely you didn’t think that Greeks are in a worse situation than Gazans??? :?

You really need to start using that pea in your head… (I’m aware you assume it’s a plum) :-|


Two reasons why it fitted here:

(1) RW had moved on from Gaza to bringing up Syria as perhaps the worst crisis. The topic had then opened up to allowing others to opine their own worst humanitarian crisis.

(2) You always tell me to take my own "Greek" threads to the Balkan forums. :P
(A preemptive strike.)
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby Get Real! » Thu Sep 03, 2015 5:06 pm

GreekIslandGirl wrote:(2) You always tell me to take my own "Greek" threads to the Balkan forums. :P
(A preemptive strike.)

Sweet woman... :)
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby kurupetos » Thu Sep 03, 2015 11:40 pm

:mrgreen:
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Re: ...I'd like to visit Gaza one day.

Postby repulsewarrior » Fri Sep 04, 2015 4:14 am

...indeed, worse than Gaza is Syria, neighbours, imagine. We, the Occidental world are the neighbours, that can give a helping hand.

...indeed, the shame i feel as a Canadian to learn today that that little boy GIG talks about should be in Canada with his mother and brother, they are not because our Prime Minister is still "developing" a plan to help them, rather than actually delivering on the Humanitarian promises he made; their sponsors, their family actually living in Canada, were left waiting.

...I learned today that the girl, a child in another iconic picture, the girl running naked toward the camera having been napalmed in Vietnam so long ago, was given refuge and lives in Canada; a stunning comparison because these people were admitted in the tens of thousands, Canada has only admitted a few thousand in this case, while Mr. Harper, Canada's Prime Minister, champions this cause with fighter jets, it is disgusting.

...indeed, Greece has felt this crush for a very long time. It has festered to become an issue where Germany has taken to plead for help, for herself. Shear numbers i suppose, how many millions are there; Gaza is small. Small, from 1967, or large and now becoming years old, Ignored essentially, what is there to expect, the invasion does not stop. Without success as a Humanitarian effort, and/or militarily, it represents a failure, and a decline, of Western Civilization.

...Hamas, it is said, have been offered an end to the blockade, in return for a permanent cease-fire. It is wishful thinking to believe that Israel offers this, yet with Cyprus the honest broker, it is one way to introduce the social-exchange that is normal, at least in terms of maritime trade. In any case "this" must stop, real enemies exist like hunger and disease, it needs an end, this vicious cycle of revenge; we can obviously do better than fight each other, Lest we Forget.
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