There’s an old saying: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.

Turn it on its head, and you have the dire consequences of Operation Cast Lead, which renders the population of Gaza sans agriculture, and in turn, sans food source.

According to Christine van Nieuwenhuyse, the World Food Programme’s country director:

“We are hearing that 60% of the land in the north – where the farming was most intensive – may not be exploitable again. It looks to me like a disaster. …Now it is going to be almost impossible for Gaza to produce the food it needs for the next six to eight months, assuming that the agriculture can be rehabilitated.” [Source]

Damaged buildings include the Ministry of Agriculture, the agriculture faculty at al-Azhar university in Beit Hanoun, and the offices of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees in Zaitoun.

In addition, potentially hundreds of wells and water sources have been damaged, several hundred greenhouses have been destroyed, and an estimated 60,000-75,000 dunums of Gaza’s 175,000 dunums (44,000 acres) of farmable land has been rendered unusable.

The scale of destruction has been increased by the sheer range of toxic elements utilized and exposed during the conflict, including white phosphorous, burst sewerage pipes, animal carcasses and roofing asbestos.

In Jabal al-Rayas every building has been knocked down and the cattle killed and left to rot in the fields.

Remind me again – how does robbing a population of its food source and essentially starving them to death, in the aftermath of a conflict, facilitate the war on terror?

As the children’s bellies grumble, and they look around the sporadically empty classroom seats, it is highly unlikely they will look over the border and whisper ‘thanks’.