Ma‘an reports, “Israel’s punitive ban on cement imports into the Gaza Strip has prevented hundreds of families from rebuilding their homes devastated by the 2014 war, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a press release Thursday. As a result of the debilitating cement scarcity and price increases, ‘organizations providing assistance have had to suspend cash assistance for house repairs to over 1,370 families.'”

“Planting hope is our main duty.” So declared Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei, the head of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP), during his April 19th keynote address to the 800 people who attended the organization’s 6th International ‘Mental Health and Human Rights’ Conference in Gaza City. This is a tall order in the Gaza Strip’s crushing conditions. But Dr. Abu Jamei – who lost 28 members of his extended family in a single missile strike during Israel’s 2014 military onslaught – is determined to build on the legacy of the late Dr. Eyad el Sarraj, who founded the GCMHP in 1990 to instill hope and heal the spirit of a people who were exposed to violence and the loss of freedom and human rights on a daily basis.

It was a tragedy that “in place of Jewish prophetic vision, Israel should launch an Orwellian nightmare of double talk, racism, fifth-rate sociological jargon, aimed at proving its racial superiority to the people it has crushed,” Daniel Berrigan said prophetically in 1973; and was denounced by Jewish organizations for saying so.