Opinion
So far in this series we’ve debunked the following “pro-Palestinian” propaganda: that the rapist butchers of Hamas are “resistance fighters”, the obvious stupidity of the Marxist claim that Jews are “settler colonialists” in their own homeland, and the obnoxiously false claims that Israel is an “apartheid state” which is committing “genocide”.
Now, we come to a more recent fabrication, popularised by American and European journalists, and parroted even by supposedly conservative politicians like David Cameron and Ron Paul: “Gaza is an open-air prison”. Mid-wit graffiti scribbler “Banksy” likewise declared, “Gaza is often described as ‘the world’s largest open air prison’ because no-one is allowed to enter or leave.”
Which is, of course, complete bollocks: people leave and enter Gaza all the time. Prior to October 7, thousands of people left Gaza every day, crossing into Israel to work at jobs that paid them five times more than they could earn in Gaza. They used that opportunity to draw detailed maps for Hamas’ planners of October 7.
There is also a border with Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. And, lest anyone forget, there is a maze of underground tunnels one recently-freed Israeli hostage calls “Lower Gaza” which presents numerous illegal exit opportunities.
Indeed, it begs the question of where all the “Palestinian refugees” fronting Greens-led, anti-Semitic rallies in the West came from, if no-one is allowed to leave?
As Ari Zivotofsky observes in the Jerusalem Post, a September 19, 2023, episode of the Palestinian television show Emigration claimed that, “in the past 15 years a quarter of a million young Palestinians left for abroad.” In 2022, over 15,000 of them who lived abroad (having apparently escaped the “prison”) willingly returned to it to celebrate the feast of Eid al-Adha.
You don’t have to be a genius — just not as willfully stupid as a “pro-Palestine” activist — to realise that that’s not how prisons work.
Hamas propagandists argue that Gazans are denied goods and services they are entitled to because of Israel’s “land, water, and sea blockade,” but Israel only blocks weapons from entering Gaza. Even after October 7, Israel has continued to supply electricity, food, and medicine.
As it happens, when you block weapons from entering Gaza, then its imports dry up. Because weapons are all Hamas-run Gaza ever imported.
In 2001, two vessels, the Calypso and the Santorini, were seized with weapons destined for Palestinian terrorists, and in 2002, a Palestinian ship called the Karine A was seized with 50 tons of Iranian weapons destined for Gaza. Since then, Israel has acted to prevent further shipments of weapons from reaching Gaza by sea. In 2007, after Hamas took over Gaza completely, Israel imposed an inspections regime and began more aggressively searching ships for smuggled weapons. Food and medicine are not prevented from entering Gaza.
Poor access to healthcare is another complaint about life in the Gaza “open-air prison.”
Except that Gaza has more hospitals per capita (36, for a population of two million) than even wealthy countries like Qatar. The only problem is that Gazans use them as military compounds, just as they do schools and homes.
No wonder even Hamas leaders and their cronies freely travelled in and out of their “prison” for the best of healthcare.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh sends his entire family to Israel for medical care. In 2013 his 1-year-old granddaughter was treated in an Israeli hospital; in 2014 his daughter was treated at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital and his mother-in-law was treated at Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Hospital; in 2021 his niece was treated at Ichilov Hospital. Just this month, it was reported that Haniyeh’s grandniece was being treated at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva.
Another common claim is that Palestinians were “starving” prior to October 7. Anyone who’s seen the photos of pudgy, overweight Hamas terrorists stripped to their undies could not take such a claim even remotely seriously. Hamas claims, by the way, that these fighters were in fact merely everyday Palestinian civilians — undermining even further the claims of “starvation”. In fact, Palestine has a higher obesity rate than New Zealand, Australia, or even prisoners in US jails, notorious for over-feeding its prisoners.
Gaza is the freest “prison”, with the fattest “starving people”, in the history of the world.
In any case, even the New York Times admits that Hamas steals food, fuel, and medical supplies from its own people: enough to keep the terrorist government of “Palestine” running for up to four months without resupply.
If Gaza is a prison, Hamas is the jailer.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism