What Gaza really needs: not a boat-load of activists

While Islamist vigilantes impose restrictions on women and girls on the streets, families still flock to UNRWA schools, where the religious strictures are lax. Hamas, still sworn to destroy the Zionist entity, for the most part is reining in other terror movements from launching attacks on Israel and has prevented mass-marches of civilians on the border fences.

No serious international government or organisation claims any longer that there is anything approaching a humanitarian crisis and yet, for Gazans, the siege, or even semi-siege, is still a daily reality. Many of them, especially young people, cannot obtain visas to leave via Egypt and there is no way for them to visit their relatives in the West Bank. The absence of open sea and air routes, and the dependency on Israel, Egypt and Hamas's rivals in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, hampers any real development of commerce and infrastructure.

Few, if any, of the supplies on the boats of the Second Gaza Freedom Flotilla are really needed in the beleaguered Strip. What the people of Gaza do need is a way out of the diplomatic limbo that has frozen life there ever since Hamas took over in June 2007. The flotilla cannot give them that, and as Hamas is not willing to change its policy, recognise Israel and the agreements signed with it, there is no sign that Israel will ease up its policy either.