The photograph above is an AP photo of a Palestinian boy who is waiting by his sick brother’s side with a manual air pump, for fear of the power going out and disabling the child’s electric respirator.

That is only a small glimpse of the reality for the powerless–in more than one sense of the word–in Gaza, as shared by Rory McCarthy in The Guardian.

He writes:

Israel said its closure of the Gaza strip was intended to halt the firing of makeshift rockets by Palestinian militants into southern Israel.

Yet Israel’s stark new policy has meant no fuel or food aid has come into Gaza since last Thursday. Large parts of the overcrowded strip had no power, leaving it without lights and heating, closing bakeries and forcing hospitals to rely on generators and their own limited fuel reserves. As night fell nearly all Gaza City was in darkness. Simply put, it was “collective punishment,” said the European commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

Osama Nahal, a paediatric doctor in the European hospital’s special care baby unit, looked resigned. “Politics is politics, but the care of human beings must be away from politics,” he said. His unit now has 10 newly-born patients, of whom two are on ventilators.

Amira Hass from Ha’aretz has written a column detailing the dismal conditions of life in Gaza due to the Israeli-imposed embargo on electricity, fuels, and many foods and medicines.

Gaza Strip residents yesterday moved from worrying about the electricity cuts of the previous 40 hours to worrying about a water shortage. The municipality needs electricity to bring water to homes and the houses need it to pump water to the roof tanks.

Hence 40 percent of Gaza Strip homes - 600,000 people - had no running water yesterday, the Palestinian water authority said.

Oxfam International said yesterday that unless diesel and fuel supplies were resumed immediately, all the Strip’s water pumps could stop working today. The non-governmental organization also warned of the sewage system’s collapse in the absence of diesel.

“Without electric power we can manage somehow, without bread too,” says a resident of the Nasser neighborhood in northern Gaza. “It’s cold enough to prevent the food from going bad and we try to open the refrigerator as little as possible. The kids grumble but they can learn to live without the computer. But without water?”

Al-Jazeera has collected reactions to the Israeli embargo on Gaza from leaders around the world, including Benita Ferrero Waldner, the European Union external relations commissioner, who said that Israel was pursuing “collective punishment” against 1.5 million innocent people in Gaza.

The EU commissioner warned that neither the closure of Gaza’s border nor the deadly air raids and incursions of the past week would bring Israel security from rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups.

“Only a credible political agreement this year … can turn Palestinians away from violence,” she said.

The InterPressService gives us the sad story of Mustapha al-Jamal, who in light of the Israeli embargo of fuel, electricity, and most medical supplies to Gaza, is going door-to-door to find appropriate medicine for his sick son. Furthermore, Israel has refused medical treatment to Mustapha’s son (no suitable hospitals exist in Gaza) because they believe his oxygen tank is–you guessed it–a “security risk.”

Seventy-six-year-old Mustapha al-Jamal goes door to door, looking for help in finding medicines for his son.

At home, the 53-year-old son Yahya al-Jamal lies back, staring at the ceiling. By his side, an oxygen cylinder keeps him going for now.

“My son’s condition continues to worsen,” Mustapha says. “We’ve been waiting two months for the medicines.”

Last year Mustapaha’s 44-year-old daughter, a mother of six, died of breast cancer. She had been recovering, but the Israeli siege blocked supply of medicines, and no one could then save her.

Mustapha sees the same happening again. Yahya’s cancer started in his kidney, spread to his right lung, and now affects his liver.

Twice, on Jul. 20 and Oct. 2 last year, Yahya was allowed passage to Sourasky Medical Centre in Tel Aviv. On the second visit the hospital agreed to give the family 28 tablets worth 35,500 shekels (9,000 dollars).

Transfer to an Israeli hospital now could give Yahya medication and hope again, but Israeli officials have refused passage for medical care, citing the oxygen cylinder as a ’security risk’.

Contrary to international humanitarian law, the Israeli army has cut off electricity and fuel supplies to the 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip as “retaliation” to homemade projectile attacks that have caused mainly property damage in remote areas of Israel.

According to Ma’an News Agency:

Most of the Gaza Strip’s 1.5 million residents are spending the night without electricity as an Israeli-imposed blockade enters its fourth consecutive night.

The Gaza Strip’s only power plant shut down on Sunday due to a shortage of fuel.

“At least 800,000 people are now in darkness,” Derar Abu Sissi, general director of the plant, told reporters on Sunday night.

Supplies of food are running out, and the water and sewage systems are on the brink of collapse.

“Under current military orders in the West Bank, the following activities are defined as threats to the security of Israel: putting up political posters, writing political slogans, participating in demonstrations and belonging to any political party.”

Interestingly enough, what counts as exercising first amendment rights in the United States counts as a “security threat” in Israel–if you’re Palestinian. A recently published report by law students from Stanford and Berkeley conducted in the field in 2006 reveals a number of startling facts about the status of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli legal system.

Some of the most startling information:

• At least 765 of the currently 9,493 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons are “administrative detainees” meaning that they are “held on secret evidence, do not have a right to a trial, and can be held for six-month periods that can be renewed indefinitely.” Furthermore, all “Palestinians detained by the Israeli military can be barred access to a lawyer for 90 days and held without being charged for 188 days.”
• Lawyers cannot have private interviews with their clients, and are only able to visit their clients “a few days each week,” “in violation of Israeli prison ordinances.” All confidential documents must be given to prison guards in order to reach the client. Furthermore, lawyers from the West Bank and Gaza cannot visit their clients, who are illegally held in prisons within Israel, “without permission from the Israeli military,” which is nearly impossible to get, especially for lawyers from Gaza.
• “Lawyers from the West Bank and Gaza can neither represent clients in Israeli civil courts nor appeal military court decisions to the Israeli High Court.”
• “Because it is so difficult for lawyers to visit prisons, the majority of client interviews are conducted at the military courts in the minutes before a prisoner’s hearing begins.”
• Military courts are not required to “publish the decisions of military judges,” and no justification is required other than stating that “their approval of a detention order was based on ’secret evidence.’”

These factors and a number of others are covered in great depth in the final 29-page report, which can be downloaded here. There is also a shorter summary in a recent edition of CounterPunch, which can be downloaded here.

The information in these reports challenges the notion that Palestinians can receive a fair trial in the Israeli court system–both military and civil–and also exposes the Israeli legal system for what it is when it comes to Palestinians: a tool of the occupation.

Ali Waked in Yedioth Ahronoth reports the following regarding Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin’s recent claim that 1,000 “terrorists” have been killed in Gaza in the past 2 years:

The B’Tselem organization expressed its surprise over Diskin’s remarks, saying that according to its figures, 816 Palestinians were killed by the IDF in that same period, including 150 minors, 48 of them under the age of 14.

Security sources later corrected Diskin’s remarks, saying that 810 terrorists were identified among the casualties, which included civilians.

“Does Yuval Diskin include five-year-old Maria Okal, eight-year-old Aya al-Astal, nine-year-old Yehi Abu Slamia and his five-year-old brother Nasrallah among the list of terrorist?” organization officials asked. “Does the Shin Bet chief refer to the blood of these and other children as the blood of terrorists?”

The Palestinian organizations also refer to 1,000 people killed in two years, but according to them, most of the casualties were civilians. According to Samir Zakkut of the al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in the Gaza Strip, the data presented by Diskin were untrue.

Richard Silverstein from Tikun Olam points to an editorial by Yossi Sarid, commenting:

If any Israeli politician is so obtuse as to worry about Barack Obama’s fealty to Israel they needn’t worry. But I think they worry about something else–that Obama will be his own man. He will do his own thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not necessarily be led by the nose by AIPAC or by an Israeli PM. There will be no plane rides over the Green Line like the one Ariel Sharon used to bamboozle George Bush into supporting Sharon’s view of Israel’s security interests. And thank God for that.

I don’t want to make the mistake of claiming that an Obama presidency would provide the break that many of us hope for from the conventions of past history in Israel-U.S. relations. He’s a politician after all and has many interest groups to satisfy not the least of which are American Jews and their conservative leaders. But I think things would be different from the recent past. I believe Obama as president would combine elements of Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush in his willingness to exert pressure on both sides for concessions. If he finds that negotiations with Iran or Syria are in the U.S.’s best interests, he will pursue them and not be constrained by ideological myopia as Bush has been.  And this is what has the Israelis nervous.

Josh Reubner of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation writes:

Today, two movements for the promotion of human rights in Sudan and Palestine seek to emulate the successful role played by boycotts, divestment, and sanctions in achieving democracy and equality in South Africa. The two movements, however, have received radically different receptions on Capitol Hill. This double standard testifies to official Washington’s selectivity when it comes to promoting human rights around the globe and its tendency to overlook the faults of its allies while using human rights as a pretext to punish its adversaries.

On December 31, President Bush signed into law the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007, which was passed unanimously by Congress earlier in the month. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd, authorizes state and local governments to divest their holdings from corporations that profit from dealings with the Sudanese government and immunizes mutual fund managers from lawsuits for doing the same.

Seth Freedman at The Guardian writes:

It’s easy to claim that the pen is mightier than the sword from the safety of a university lecture hall, or a middle class soiree in a suburban dining room. However, in the bandit country that is Hebron, the adage rings somewhat hollow, as I found after spending a day out on patrol with Temporary International Presence in the City of Hebron (TIPH). What I saw during my six-hour shadowing of the dedicated yet ultimately toothless members of the TIPH team made me question the wisdom of their presence in the troubled city.