Gaza: UN official shocked

No surprise here! The BBC reports - and all too sadly most other media outlets won't - on the response by a top UN official to a 4 day visit toGaza:

"The UN's top humanitarian affairs official has said he was shocked by the "grim and miserable" situation he witnessed on a visit to the Gaza Strip.

Undersecretary General John Holmes said it was the result of Israel closing its border crossings and the "limited food and other materials" allowed in.

Mr Holmes said 80% of Gaza's 1.5m population now depended on food aid."

And:

"As part of a four-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Mr Holmes toured the Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, and the Karni industrial zone near the closed cargo crossing on the Israeli border.

"I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things I have seen and heard about during the day," he told reporters at the main UN compound in Gaza City."

Meanwhile, over at counterpunch, a piece "Palestine in the Mind of America" by 2 former CIA political analysts:

"You would think that showing maps clearly delineating the truncated, obviously non-viable area available for a possible Palestinian state and showing pictures that define Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories would have some kind of impact on an audience of astute but, on this issue, generally uninformed Americans. We recently spoke to a small foreign affairs discussion group and devoted much of our presentation to these images of oppression -- images that never appear in the U.S. media -- in the probably naïve hope of making some kind of dent in the impassive American attitude toward Israel's 40-year occupation of Palestinian territory."

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