FOREIGN POLICY
Two years have just passed since Israel's Operation Cast Lead, which aimed to stop rocket fire from Gaza and arms imports into the territory. Since then, only the efforts of international activists to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in 2010, most famously the Turkish boat Mavi Marmara in May 2010, created any urgency to address the plight of the impoverished Palestinian territory. Those events did lead Israel's security cabinet, under concerted international pressure, to announce a set of measures to ease its land blockade, though a coalition of international humanitarian NGOs hascriticized the move as inadequate. Rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel and its communities has also risen alarmingly over the past few weeks. Faced with banner headlines about the "Palestine Papers," the people's uprising in Tunisia, protests in Egypt, and escalating political tensions in Lebanon, Western observers are hardly focused on Gaza under Hamas rule. But the recent rise in hostilities between the Israeli military and Gaza's militants as well as the plight of Gazans themselves should be a timely reminder of the danger of ignoring the Gaza situation for too long.
Before Hamas forcefully took over the territory in June 2007, I had lived and worked in Gaza as an official for the United Nations. On my recent trip there to assess current socioeconomic conditions and Hamas's efforts at governance and institution-building, I found that Gaza had changed dramatically in the intervening years, and not necessarily for the better.
