"AMY GOODMAN: Well Amira, let me ask you, President Obama praised Netanyahu for the easing of the blockade. Can you talk about what that means?
AMIRA HASS: Perhaps Obama should ask himself if he would set aside in life of just getting chips and ketchup and Coca-Cola and
not being allowed to produce, to create, to export, to send his daughters to university, to have visitors from outside—if this is the life that he thinks are suitable for human beings, then maybe all the Americans who voted for him made a mistake.
AMY GOODMAN: Well explain—
AMIRA HASS: Because the blockade here. Look, everybody talks about food when we come to this blockade.
"So now Israel is giving some more items of food, allowing the Palestinian merchants to buy some more items of food to get into Gaza and maybe some other stuff, I don’t know.
"But everything which is connected to raw materials for industry, for producing, anything connected to construction material is very limited. Nothing has changed. So adding ketchup, as somebody told me, does not make people feel that the blockade is over.
"Maybe now there are more types of shampoo that Israel will allow to enter. But anyway, in the past years, Palestinians have managed to bring in shampoo and some other hygiene products from Egypt through the tunnels.
"This is not the blockade.
"The blockade is about being imprisoned in Gaza.
"This is the real closure.
"This is the real siege.
"And this is not going to change.
"Only today there was a court hearing of the petition of a Palestinian lawyer, woman lawyer, female lawyer, from Gaza who wants to complete her M.A. Studies at the University and the state does not allow her because they say when it comes to the passage,
the movement of human beings, nothing has changed.
"They still do not allow or they haven’t been allowed anywhere for the past ten or fifteen years but evermore severely, they don’t allow the passage, the movement of people between Gaza and the West Bank except in some rare, very exceptional humanitarian cases.
"So this remains the same.
"
This remains the same. also, Palestinians cannot export.
"Israel is talking only about bringing in products, not exporting.
"So even if Palestinians got raw materials, for example for textiles for furniture, the traditional industry that Gazans excel at,
they are not allowed to export them.
"So they won’t earn a living. So Gaza is a huge prison where people are dependent on charity, some sort of charity. This situation is not going to change now, with Israel’s new measures."
Amira Hass