Analysis: People of Gaza are living in the land that time forgot

GOVERNMENT is all about statistics, but life is about people. That disjunction explains a lot about the cynicism and disaffection with politics that characterises much of the world nowadays.

And, while domestic problems may seem intractable, distance increases the confusion and fatigue induced by seemingly intractable international problems. As usual, the people who suffer are those who most need the world’s attention.

This is notably true of the 1.5 million people crowded into the Gaza strip, locked between Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea. The West has already isolated Gaza’s Hamas-controlled government. This week, the United States Congress will discuss cutting off aid to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. But this is a time for more international engagement with the Palestinian people, not less.

Statistics show 80 per cent of Gaza’s population is dependent on UN food aid. The youth unemployment rate is 65 per cent. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has a comprehensive database that shows how many trucks, containing different kinds of supplies, have been allowed in by Israel.

The situation of the people – or rather the fight about their situation – is periodically in the news, most recently when violence broke the ceasefire in August. But Gaza has become the land that time – and the wider international community – forgot.

I took up an offer from Save the Children to visit the Gaza Strip last week. I had not been able to visit while serving in government for security reasons. Now I wanted to get a sense of life, not statistics. The purpose of the visit was not to meet politicians or decision makers, but to get a glimpse, albeit brief, of how people there live.

And there is real life. Boys in football shirts – mainly Barcelona strips. Restaurants overlooking the Mediterranean. Schoolgirls in white headscarves wherever you look. Barbers, clothes shops, fruit stalls.

But real life is also traumatic and limited. We saw buildings – not just the former Hamas headquarters – still in rubble. Houses are riddled with bullet holes. There is no electricity for up to eight hours a day.

We met the niece and son of a farmer caught in the “buffer zone” between the Israeli border and Gaza. She had lost an eye and he a hand to Israeli shells in the war of 2008-2009. Save the Children, obviously, is most concerned about the 53 per cent of the Gaza population aged under 18. Ten per cent of children are “stunted” – so undernourished before the age of two they never grow to their full potential.

There is remarkable work being done to create opportunities, as well as to prevent catastrophe. The Qattan Center for the Child is a privately funded library – and drama, computer, and youth centre – that would grace any British community. The director told me it is dedicated to the credo of “building people not buildings.” The centre is a true oasis.

But the situation around it represents the ultimate failure of politics. After January 2009, the international community was preoccupied with opening up Gaza. Nearly three years later, there is only stalemate – to match the wider stalemate in the search for a Palestinian state that can live alongside Israel.

The responsibility lies, first and foremost, with Israel. The UN’s Gaza peace resolution (which Britain authored) calls on the Israeli government to open up supply lines, but this has been heeded only in part. That is why the tunnels do such a roaring trade, which Hamas taxes to fund its activities. The Israeli government would retort that the parallel call in the resolution for a halt to the flow of arms into Gaza also has not been heeded. That is true, too.

But international pressure is muted. Gaza’s people remain in what Prime Minister David Cameron last year called an “open prison.” Surely there is room across divides of party and nation to address these pressing humanitarian needs, which simply fuel future political trouble.

What makes the situation in Gaza even more infuriating is that the status quo is actually irrational. It is not in anyone’s political interest. Israel doesn’t become safer, nor do Hamas or Fatah become more popular.

One young mother at the Qattan Centre told me that she was just completing her accountancy degree – but there was no work. Yusuf, 9, told me that he wanted to be a pilot. These people are not a threat to peace in the Middle East. They are its hope. What they need is a chance to shape their own futures.

• David Miliband is MP for South Shields and was Foreign Secretary from 2007 until 2010