Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The story has it that Russian noble and officer Grigory Potemkin, who stole the Crimea from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, faced a dilemma. The place was a mess after the Russian conquest, but Tsarina Catherine the Great wanted to see her new possession. So Potemkin set up fake façades in pasteboard that looked like a village, and brought in some smiling peasants to stand before them, as Catherine sailed by. Then he had them dismantled and reassembled downriver so that she would think there was a whole set of such thriving villages. The tale is untrue, but worked its way into a popular biography of Potemkin and became the stuff of legend.
President Joe Biden’s floating pier off Gaza, which went operational on Friday, is such a Potemkin Village. While it isn’t completely useless, it cannot replace overland truck deliveries of food and aid. At most it will supply 150 trucks worth of aid daily, when 500 are needed. It is a PR band aid on the gaping wound of Israeli genocidal blockage of aid to the civilian population.
The pier’s operation is interrupted anytime there are high winds or sea swells. It is far from population centers. It is vulnerable to Israeli indiscriminate artillery and drone fire. It can be hit by Hamas sabotage. It depends on the delivery of the aid by United Nations workers (including UNRWA, which Biden hysterically defunded because of Israeli lies that it is a Hamas front). These aid workers, as with those of the World Central Kitchen, have sometimes been struck by Israeli fire, apparently in some cases deliberately.
The floating pier cost $320 million, which could have fed a lot of Palestinians if the Israelis hadn’t closed off almost all aid truck routes into the Strip.
Al Jazeera English: “Aid agencies: Land routes are more effective”
Meanwhile, in the real world the Israeli attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable and to ethnically cleanse its Palestinian inhabitants accelerated.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that the Israeli army has in recent days forced 640,000 Palestinian refugees out of Rafah (to which it had earlier exiled them).
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Displaced Palestinians pack their belongings before leaving an unsafe area in Rafah on May 15, 2024 (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images).
This expulsion of nearly a fourth of the entire population is problematic because, OCHA says, “Our colleagues working on ensuring that people in Gaza have adequate shelter say there are no remaining stocks of shelter materials inside Gaza.”
No shelter, no shelter materials.
People don’t have a pot to piss in. Or defecate in. The mass displacement at Israeli hands “has exacerbated the water and sanitation crisis, with sewage overflow and solid waste spreading across roads, displacement camps, and the rubble of destroyed homes – with a catastrophic impact on health.”
I repeat, sewage overflow and solid waste are spreading across roads and through the makeshift camps. Aid workers have talked about Gaza being awash in green slime, with the toxic brew spread to humans by a cloud of aggressive black flies that try to get into your mouth. The NGO Action for Humanity (AFH) says that some 270,000 tons of garbage and sewage have piled up in Gaza, with the Israelis interdicting access to the major landfill and preventing it from being disposed of.
AFH continues, “The lack of safe drinking water and poor sanitation conditions continue to fuel rising cases of acute jaundice syndrome and bloody watery diarrhoea, posing a significant public health challenge.”
These refugees, hungry, sick, and some wounded by Israeli indiscriminate fire, have been death-marched to Deir al-Balah governorate or to Khan Younis, both of which have been destroyed and left bereft of shelter, toilets, functioning hospitals and bakeries. The World Health Organization says of hospitals that they are themselves on life support because the Israelis have embargoed the fuel they need to operate: “Spokesperson Tarik Jašarević reported that only 13 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are now partially functioning, emphasizing that fuel is required for electricity and to run generators. He said health partners require between 1.4 million to 1.8 million litres monthly so that hospitals can function, but only 159,000 litres have entered Gaza since the border closure, ‘and that’s clearly not sufficient.'” The Israelis are letting in a tenth of the fuel needed to run the hospitals.
Imagine being told you have to hit the road carrying your few possessions and children, after months of starvation and drinking dirty water, and to try to find shelter in Khan Younis, which looks like this:
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A displaced Palestinian woman pushes a stroller as she walks in front of destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 16, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Or perhaps you might prefer the well appointed apartments of Deir al-Balah after they’ve been the recipients of the tender mercies of the Israeli military:
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DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA – MAY 15: A general view of the completely destroyed house belonging to the Berash family and the damaged buildings around it as a result of the Israeli attack on Bureij refugee camp in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on May 15, 2024. As a result of the Israeli attack, one building was completely destroyed and many houses and structures in the surrounding area were damaged as Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip continue uninterruptedly for 222 days. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Grain is essential to the human diet. In central Gaza, there are only five bakeries still functioning that Israel shells haven’t pulverized, four in Gaza City and one in Deir Balah. About twelve more are physically intact but have the severe disadvantage of having no fuel or flour, which would not make for what you might call… a bakery.
UN and volunteer aid workers can therefore only provide tiny meals, and are concentrating on Khan Younis and Deir al Balah.
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