Israel set for another war on Gaza

Recent media reports have raised fears that Israel is planning another war on Gaza under the pretext that rockets have been fired into southern Israel.

The reports suggest that Tel Aviv is planning to launch another war on Gaza, which has yet to recover from the December 2008-January 2009 war Israel launched on the impoverished strip.

Israel has increased and intensified its attacks on Gaza over the past few months, with many Palestinians killed or injured in the assaults.

In December, at least five people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the town of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. This was one of the deadliest attacks since the December 2008-January 2009 war, a Press TV correspondent reported.

The 22-day Israeli onslaught took the lives of more than 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the populated coastal strip and left thousands more injured. It also inflicted over USD 1.6 billion in damages on the territory’s economy.

Tel Aviv laid an economic siege on the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after Hamas took control of the coastal sliver.

In June 2010, Israel declared that it will ease the blockade described by the United Nations as “collective punishment” and “medieval.”

A UN report, however, indicates that little has changed on the ground in Gaza after the announcement.

The report by 21 international organizations including Amnesty International and Oxfam in December said the reality is that there has been an increase in food and consumer goods coming into Gaza, but little increase in construction materials.

“The accumulation of many years of underdevelopment here every year becomes worse. We have exhausted all of the arrangements to try to cope…. It’s the ordinary people who are suffering as a consequence,” said John Ging, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.