The cost of Gaza's hostility

I read through this BBC report on an Israeli air strike taking out a terrorist rocket crew in Gaza expecting to find that the Israelis were aiming for some Palestinian children, but missed. In the absence of civilian casualties the Beeb has to look elsewhere to get a dig in:

Correspondents say last week's declaration by Israel of Gaza as ‘hostile territory’ sets the stage for cutting electricity to the impoverished coastal territory which has 1.4 million inhabitants.

If you read the story you'll see that the paragraph doesn't naturally fit into it, but has been shoehorned in purely to inject an anti-Israel note.

I meant to post on the ‘hostile territory’ development last week, but got sidetracked, so thanks to the Beeb for bringing it up again, which gives me the opportunity to quote from two NRO posts that put the lie to the media's ‘Gazans under siege’ theme.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson at The Corner:

Why would [Hamas] not welcome such a state of clear-cut armed conflict against the hated Zionist entity, given that they are already constantly rocketing Jews? And second, why not simply make arrangements with Egypt to connect infrastructure, power, and trade, and seal on its own the border with Israel, while developing much closer ties with a brother Arab state? Or alternatively, with Gulf oil money Hamas might develop port facilities to ensure supplies of fuel and export/import trade, or even a power and water plant of their own on the coast.

And here's J. Peter Pham at The Tank:

While some like the United Nations official quoted in the [Jerusalem Post] article will argue that Israel is engaging in "collective punishment", the Jewish state is doing nothing more than what any other nation at war does with a declared enemy. Did the Allies in World War II feel themselves bound to make sure that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had an adequate supplies of petroleum? The object of a blockade, after all, is to degrade the enemy's ability to continue fighting effectively. As long as shipments of basic foodstuffs and medicine for use by non-combatants are allowed past a blockade—after due inspection, if necessary, to prevent the smuggling of contraband—a country at war, unlike a former spouse paying alimony, is hardly obliged to keep a declared enemy in the style to which he or she has become accustomed.

Pham also has a superb article, written with Michael I. Krauss, at The American Thinker, in which they explain that Israel’s actions are entirely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and which includes this observation, which I’m going to start posting as a comment on every BBC story on the subject:

Egypt, during its entire occupation of the territory from 1948-67, never developed Gaza's energy infrastructure, leaving the strip destitute and primitive. Israel's integration of Gaza into its supply grid has allowed Gazans to develop their industry and agriculture.

The Western Media has developed a bizarre tendency to completely disassociate the actions of the armed thugs that run Gaza with the fate of its citizens. But until Gazans decide to elect leaders who are committed to peace, and not war, they’re going to have to lie in the bed they’ve made for themselves.