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“Breadless in Gaza”

Source: AFP—Thu, 20 Nov 2008

Bakeries in the Gaza Strip will soon have to shut down for want of flour if Israel does not ease its crippling blockade of the Hamas-run territory, the bakers’ association warned on Thursday.

‘All the bakeries will close in two days at the most if the Israeli blockade continues,’ the head of the association, Abdelnasser al-Ajrami, told AFP.

Since a flare-up of violence on the Gaza-Israel border on 5 November, Israel has tightened the blockade it first imposed on the territory when the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in June last year.

Almost daily over the past fortnight, deliveries of both food and fuel for Gaza's sole power plant have been blocked.

Last week, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees was forced to suspend food deliveries to half of Gaza's 1.5 million population. It distributed some rations on Tuesday after Israel allowed some food in the previous day.

Israel was expected to ease its blockade after an Egyptian-brokered truce with Hamas went into effect on 19 June.

It says continuing rocket and mortar attacks have made this impossible but Hamas accuses it of failing to deliver on its side of the bargain.

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The Fourth Geneva Convention

Article 33. [Collective punishments] ‘No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. . . . Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.’

[from Wikipedia] Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there.

The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to ‘intimidatory measures to terrorize the population’ in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices ‘strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice.’