Carter Decries Gaza Situation (and cries)

Former President Jimmy Carter visited Gaza on Tuesday and slammed Israel for their treatment of the territory’s 1.5 million residents. Since their conflict with Hamas, who controls the territory last January, Israel has maintained a strict blockade on the Gaza Strip. But this has prevented many Gazans from repairing the thousands of buildings damaged or destroyed by the fighting. The Israeli blockade has been so tight that some Gazans have resorted to using mud to repair their damaged homes (mud historically has been used as a building material in the region so the idea's not all that crazy, we just don't usually think to build mud buildings in the middle of urban areas in the 21st century).

While the Washington Post said that Carter "decried" the Gaza destruction and the Israeli blockade, other media reports said that conditions on the ground moved him to tears. The former president didn't hold back in his criticism saying that the Gazans were being treated "more like animals than human beings", and that "never before in history has a large community been savaged by bombs and missiles and then deprived of the means to repair itself." Carter went on to say that the Israeli blockade has caused many Gazans to rely on smugglers, who use tunnels under the border from Egypt, to survive.

One interesting development - Carter said that Hamas' exiled leader Khaled Meshal, whom Carter met in Syria, told him that Hamas would accept a peace agreement with Israel if the Palestinians approved the measure in a referendum, and if Israel returned to its 1967 borders - leaving the West Bank and Gaza - this now puts Hamas in-line with the pan-Arab peace deal put forward by the Saudis in 2002.

Meanwhile a group of 40 humanitarian organizations, including the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Oxfam International and CARE all called for Israel to lift its blockade to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza.