Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
For the past few years, the report has been between five and ten pages long. The report goes into detail of Israeli restrictions on travel and trade to and from Gaza. It describes how many medical cases are approved and denied, how many truckloads of goods are imported, and how Israel continues to restrict certain dual use items.
It is filled with invective. The latest report for June 2023, begins like most of them have:
The Israeli occupation authorities continue to impose an illegal and inhuman closure on the Gaza Strip for 16 consecutive years, inflecting negative repercussions on the humanitarian conditions of the Gaza Strip population. The Israeli occupation authorities also isolate more than 2.3 million Palestinians from the outside world through its control over the Gaza Strip’s crossing, by restricting the movement of goods and individuals from and into the Gaza Strip.
We are told that Israel only allowed 42,006 Palestinians to exit the Gaza Strip and 55,689 entered via the Erez Crossing, many of them day laborers.
There are pages of these statistics leavened with how the Israelis are making Gazan lives awful with these restrictions.
But what about Egypt's crossing with Gaza at Rafah?
At the very end of the six page report is a single paragraph:
Movement at Rafah Border CrossingAccording to the Crossing and Borders Authority in Gaza, in June, 12,995 persons traveled from the Gaza Strip via Rafah Crossing while 17,405 persons returned to the Strip. Moreover, the Egyptian authorities denied travel of 214 persons. Travelers returning to the Gaza Strip via Rafah Crossing suffer from prolonged, recurrent, and unjustified searches.
How many of them were medical? What were the reasons given for the denials? Why are the numbers of Gazans allowed to go to Egypt so much fewer than those allowed to go to Israel? What are the restrictions on Gazans once they enter Egypt? Are Egypt's more draconian restrictions of travel "illegal and inhuman?"
Clearly, PCHR knows more about what goes on at Rafah than they are publishing, because they know that Egypt is treating Gazans with little respect. They know about Egypt's permit system and how Hamas prioritizes its own members to be able to travel while ordinary Gazans who try to travel to Egypt and beyond cannot plan their trips because of the arbitrary nature and last minute changes of these permits.
PCHR knows all this - but it doesn't report these facts in its monthly reports that are supposedly about all the border crossings with Gaza. It barely mentions anything negative about Egypt, instead concentrating on Israel, which allows three times the number of travelers that Egypt does.
If PCHR is a human rights group, then it shouldn't matter whether it is Israel or Egypt restricting travel. The report should be equally critical and expansive describing both of them. Israel has no control over the Raha crossing, only Egypt and Hamas. But if PCHR is really a PFLP-dominated anti-Israel propaganda organization that pretends to care about human rights, then it would act exactly as it does - only emphasizing what Israel does and virtually ignoring what Egypt does.
This is a microcosm of how little "human rights" groups care about Palestinians. When they are oppressed by their fellow Arabs, these organizations will only report the minimum they can get away with. after all, their funding is directly proportional with the amount of anti-Israel reporting they do.
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