Agony in Gaza - What You Can Do!

By Carolyn Bninski

On Dec. 14, Marie Colvin wrote in the Times of London about the massive tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza..

She tells the story of one family: "As a convoy of blue-and-white United Nations trucks loaded with food waited last night for Israeli permission to enter Gaza, Jindiya Abu Amra and her 12-year-old daughter went scrounging for the wild grass their family now lives on."

Abu Amra, 43, said, "Every day, I wake up and start looking for wood and plastic to burn for fuel and I beg. When I find nothing, we eat this grass."

Abu Amra's small house is bare of furniture and cupboards because everything has been burned for heat.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the agony of the Palestinians has been deliberately created by Israel. Since Nov. 5, Israel has blocked the United Nations from delivering food to 750,000 people (out of a population of 1.5 million) in the Gaza Strip.

It gets even worse: Half of the population of Gaza are children. Israel also has blocked delivery of fuel, medicines and other necessities of life.

The Palestinians are in agony -- the agony of hunger and starvation, of being too cold, of seeing their children suffer and die, of being displaced from their homeland, of being denied the ability to make enough money to supply the basics of life to their families.

How does this happen? How is it that humans will sit by and not say, "Stop, you can't do this to my fellow humans?"

Last night I couldn't sleep. Sometimes watching what humans do to other humans is too painful to bear. If you think about it too much, you want to cry.

But if you don't think about it -- if you refuse to look at it at least some of the time -- you become numb and lose some of your humanity.

What can we do? We can all call The United States Congress persons and express our horror and opposition to the complicity of our government in this genocide. We can ask them to cut off funding and pressure Israel in other ways. We can ask others to call and bring this information to organizations we belong to.

We can get involved in other actions.