Campaign To Weaken And Starve Palestinians Succeeding Admirably

War on Gaza ghetto enters new phase - The Israeli campaign to deny the 1.5 million residents of Gaza their basic right to food has in recent days been showing signs of success.

"Israel has enforced a 20-month blockade on the Gaza Strip and has managed to cripple the economy with its recent war that inflicted over $1.6 billion of harm on the Gazans.

Abu Omar Abu Karsh, a chicken salesperson who now sits idly at once the busiest shop in the Remal neighborhood of Gaza City, said that the price of a living chicken had been 10 to 12 shekels (around 2.6 dollars) per kilogram (2.2 pounds) before the war. The military operations on Gaza, however, pushed chicken prices through the roof "and during the war we sold it for 55 shekels", he said.

Israel has bulldozed three of the eleven chicken hatcheries in the strip and severely damaged two of the others. With the lack of production power in the Palestinian ghetto, even relative calm has been unable to influence prices. Chicken meat is now sold at 35 shekels (9 dollars) a kilogram. "Chicken is the only meat that the poor can afford but the increase of the prices forced the people to turn away from buying and my sales decreased by 90 percent," Abu Karsh told Xinhua.

"Living in Gaza is really becoming so difficult, and day-by-day living is becoming so hard. We really don't know where to go and we really don't know how long this will last, and we really get very tired," said Mattar."

"While Tel Aviv has already hinted at its willingness to open another war on the densely-populated territory, Egyptian crackdowns on the entry of sheep into Gaza and Israeli attacks on fishing boats add to the suffering of the Palestinians."