Written By : TrogloPundit

I’ll be the first to admit: I know very, very little about Gaza. But I know that I know very, very little about Gaza because of this story:

A nice new shopping mall opened today in Gaza: Will the media report on it?

It’s a long post with a lot of info by a guy named Tom Gross: a “journalist and international affairs commentator, specializing in the Middle East.”

An excerpt:

Last year, this website was the first to reveal to a Western audience pictures of the bustling, crowded food markets of Gaza that the Western media refuse to show you. Earlier this year, I first reported the new Olympic-size swimming pool of Gaza (no shortage of building materials or water here) and the luxury restaurants, where you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.

A few other tidbits:

In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per 1,000 births.

In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per 1,000 births.

Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Gaza’s GDP is almost as high as Turkey’s and much, much higher than most of Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the West.

Tom’s just wondering whether those aid flotillas should be sailing the other way.

And, of course, the shopping mall:

Hey, you gotta get those hajibs somewhere.

Lots more info at the link. Had you asked me this morning to describe Gaza, I’d likely have said something about cobbled-together settlements; low standards of living; dissatisfaction and regular violence.

I’d have been right, to a point. But beyond that point…well, that looks pretty wealthy. Western, even. At the very least, it makes you wonder just how bad the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is.

The TrogloPundit

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