As ground troops enter Gaza and Israel’s declared war on Hamas escalates, it is easy to imagine that this is an aberration. But the current attack on Palestinians living in Gaza is the planned, logical extension of a strategy to suffocate Palestinians. Before this attack, Gaza had increasingly been described as a humanitarian crisis but Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis, it is a political one, a man made, determined one. This attack is a natural continuation of more than 60 years of occupation, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing. Robert Fisk reminds of this in the Independent:

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

. And because it is a political crisis, it is a human crisis. My friend Jen Marlowe tells of the intimate human impact of this invasion through the story of Abeer, a young woman who is about to give birth to a baby amidst the explosions and gunfire. She writes:

Beyond the humanitarian disaster that is Gaza Srip, beyond the rubble-strewn streets and the constant fear of new assaults, there is this horrific reality: no matter how precious Gaza’s children are to their mothers, they are the helpless pawns of all those who execute, support and benefit from the continuing violence