Anti-siege committee urges Kouchner to pressure Israel to lift Gaza siege

17 February 2008

GAZA, (PIC)-- The popular committee against the siege urged Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, who is on an official visit to the occupied Palestinian lands to intervene urgently to pressure Israel to lift its unjust siege.

In a letter addressed to Kouchner, the committee explained the humanitarian situation in Gaza under the siege and called on the French government to intervene in favor of the Palestinian people through lifting the siege and increasing its aid to the impoverished Gaza people.

The committee underlined that the Israeli siege imperils the lives of one million and a half Palestinians and deprives them from living a decent life, pointing out that the poverty rate in Gaza reached more than 80 percent.

The committee's letter included the suffering of Palestinian businessmen and merchants whom the IOA is deliberately holding their merchandise in Israeli ports and imposing exorbitant fines on them without allowing them to clear their goods.

The letter also highlighted that the siege affected most the health sector, where more than 90 Palestinian patients died and thousand others are threatened with death as a result of the Israeli ban imposed on the entry of medicines and medical appliances, other than the ban on the travel of patients in need of medical treatment abroad.

In related context, the same committee appealed to international human rights organizations to intervene rapidly to pressure the IOA to admit construction materials into besieged Gaza in order to rebuild hundreds of Palestinian houses destroyed by Israeli shelling and air strikes.

The committee stated that hundreds of Palestinians including women and children became homeless and slept outdoors in the cold on Friday after Israel bombed their houses in the Breij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.

In another context related to the offensive anti-Islam cartoons re-published in Danish newspapers, the committee opined that it is a blatant attempt to avert attention from the Israeli crimes being committed daily in the besieged Gaza Strip, to alleviate the growing sympathy with the Palestinian people and to busy the Arab and Islamic masses with another battle against Islam.

The committee said that the realization of the real intents behind the Danish cartoons calls upon Arabs and Muslims to protest against this crime through holding more events in solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people especially in the Gaza Strip.