Higher education, according to an Israeli Defense minister is not a humanitarian concern. Within the bantustan-like confines of the Palestinian territories, seven Gaza Strip residents awarded Fulbright scholarships are coming to terms with yet another causality of the Israeli blockade.
Denied visas by Israel, the US State Department has had to withdraw their grants. Inside Israel, lawmakers from the Knesset Education Committee have labeled the policy as immoral and are pressuring the Israeli military to reverse its decision.
The Gaza Strip is already suffering a humanitarian crisis on a scale never before seen since the Israeli military occupation of 1967 (see Oxfam report).
To deny the fundamental universal right to an education, to deny the "full development of the human personality," and "the strengthening of respect of human rights," is a crime that further demonstrates Israel's myopic closure policy (Article 26 , Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
The eleven-month blockade is an abomination exasperated by what Desmund Tutu has called the international community's "silence and complicity".
