Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Missing Peace has an excellent report on just what it was that was found aboard the Gaza Flotilla: Humanitarian aid on the Flotilla. Guess what? Three of the six ships, including the Turkish Mavi Marmara, had no "humanitarian aid" on them whatsoever. Here are a few highlights:
...A breakdown of the cargo found on the ships shows that of the six ships of the flotilla only three had humanitarian aid aboard:
Gaza ship: building materials, cement, iron - The ship has not been fully unloaded.
Sofi ship: building materials, iron
Defne Y ship: clothing, humanitarian aid (roughly 40 trucks worth), and games, building materials, wheelchairs.
The "Marmara": carried only passengers and their personal belongings. Many passengers carried large sums of money on their body. There was no Humanitarian aid on this ship.
The other two ships did not carry humanitarian aid as well
The humanitarian aid on all the ships was not packaged and not placed on the ship in an organized way, as one would expect from an organized humanitarian aid cargo. Everything was in individual units thrown on to a pile on the ships. This was not only unsafe, but it also caused a lot of damage to the objects, since the weight crushed a lot of things and since a lot of the things were just thrown on board...
The nature of the "aid":
... Medicine: Out of the 400 tons of humanitarian aid on the ship only about 4 tons was medicine and medical equipment. A Japanese reporter who visits Gaza regularly, said that what is needed in Gaza is hospital/medical equipment and medicine. He said that if the flotilla would have been really concerned about what is needed in Gaza, they would have made sure to send more medical things. Furthermore, most of the medicine was expired. Medicines were shown whose expiration date was Sept. 2009. The medicines were stored in a separate cooled in-door storage space.
Clothing and shoes: most of the clothes and shoes were so worn that they cannot be used. Many of the shoes had holes and the shoe soles were half broken; many of the clothes were torn. They were private donations and were just thrown on to the ship.
Only 1/3 of the ship's cargo was new equipment.
Cement and other construction materials: all the construction materials on the ships are waiting for project approvals in the Gaza Strip. The minute a specific humanitarian project is approved the construction material is allowed into the Strip. For example 151 housing units of the UNRWA have been approved and construction material will be transferred for it...
What this amounts to is yet further proof that this flotilla had no other purpose than politics, and as such it had even less (read: none) legal right to run the blockade.
