Dr. Sara Roy was my master’s thesis adviser at Harvard. She’s brilliant and her recent article on Foreign Policy is stinging: “Indeed, most Gazans have been impoverished and too many have known hunger, a reality (in the form of a strangulating economic siege) deliberately and principally imposed for years by Israel, the U.S., EU and Egypt on a defenseless and overwhelmingly young civilian population. Perhaps most alarming, recent indicators strongly suggest that the ability of people to feed themselves and their children has diminished even further.
In a recent report on food and water insecurity in the Gaza Strip, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) revealed some striking statistics regarding the damage incurred. For example, levels of food insecurity–defined by the World Food Programme as a “lack of access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food, which meets dietary needs…for an active and healthy life”–rose from 40 percent in 2003 to 61 percent towards the end of 2010. This means that over 900,000 people out of a total population of 1.5 million “do not have the self-sufficient means to grow or purchase the bare minimum amount of food for themselves and their families” (while another 200,000-plus remain vulnerable to food insecurity).”
