Toys, spices, sewing machines: the items Israel banned from entering Gaza

I wrote this text for The Guardian to accompany Mona Chalabi’s illustrations depicting some of the items Israel has banned from entering or allowed into Gaza at various moments in time. The fluctuating policy has targeted a huge range of items, as tracked by an Israeli human rights group. The latest version of the blockade is nearly total.

Israel has long maintained a blockade of Gaza, at times allowing only products deemed “vital for the survival of the civilian population” to enter. Gisha, an Israeli human rights group dedicated to the free movement of Palestinians, assembled lists of banned items – from newspapers to notebooks and spices to sweets – from conversations with Palestinian businesspeople and international organizations importing goods into the strip. These graphics illustrate some of what was allowed in and what was barred from entry between 2007 and 2010, based on Gisha’s findings.

Israel had already been limiting the movement of goods and people between Gaza and the West Bank at least since the early 1990s. In 2006, after Hamas won 74 out of 132 seats in the Palestinian legislative elections, Israel escalated its blockade, imposed the year before, hoping to make life so difficult for the Palestinians of Gaza that they would turn on Hamas out of desperation. Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister at the time, described the strategy this way: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” Weisglass said, “but not to make them die of hunger.”

It didn’t work. By the summer of 2007, Hamas had battled its adversary Fatah in the streets of Gaza and prevailed. The group took control over the Gaza Strip and Israel responded by making its blockade permanent, severely limiting Gaza’s access to the outside world. The blockade was formalized to such a degree that the Israeli military commissioned its own internal study determining the minimum number of calories Palestinians would need to avoid malnutrition…

Read (and see) the rest here.