#6 When has there not been a "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza?
Response :
Although statistics specifically for Gaza are hard to come by, an important 2002 Commentary article by Efraim Karsh noted that under the Israeli “occupation”—more fairly termed administration—that began in 1967, Gaza and the West Bank in fact made “astounding social and economic progress”:
In the economic sphere, most of this . . . was the result of access to the . . . Israeli economy: the number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.
During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world—ahead of such "wonders"as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. . . . GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, [but] expand[ed] tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715. . . . By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria's, more than four times Yemen's, and 10 percent higher than Jordan's. . . . Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
(...)
perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980Â’s, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990Â’s, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.
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The UN said on Monday it had suspended its building projects in the Gaza Strip due to a shortage of supplies following Hamas’s violent seizure of the Palestinian territory last month. “Some 93 million dollars-worth of projects are on hold because cement and other building supplies have run out,” John Ging, the director of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, said in a statement. UNRWA warned in the wake of the Islamist group’s seizure of Gaza on June 15 that aid flowing into the impoverished territory, mainly from Israel, was not enough to prevent a humanitarian crisis. 