We have just passed the one-year anniversary of a catastrophic 51-day Israeli assault on the Gaza strip. The major offensive – “Operation Protective Edge” – was the third one of its kind since 2007 and claimed the lives of more than 2,200 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were civilians. Roughly 11,000 Gazans were maimed, injured or permanently disfigured. This is not to mention the immeasurable destruction it wrought on Gaza’s infrastructure; more than 100,000 buildings in Gaza – a stretch of land covering a measly 360 sq km – were damaged or destroyed, and have not yet been rebuilt. It was a war that, despite its hardly unsurprising nature, was so forceful and unrelenting, that it managed to in some sense rattle the international community, renowned for its beguiling indifference to Palestinian suffering. “OPERATION PROTECTIVE EDGE” For many of us who watch and care about the systematic abuse of Palestinians, even during so-called “peacetime” and “ceasefires”, there was certainly a collective feeling last July that the world was waking up to the reality that what had been sold as simply a “conflict” between two sides, is in fact a…
Unrecovered and Unremembered: Gaza One Year After “Operation Protective Edge”
July 31, 2015
