Middle East Quartet must show its teeth

The Quartet’s greatest failure has been in not holding Israel accountable for accelerating the impoverishment and suffering of Palestinians. In the short term, the Palestinians desperately require aid – nearly 80 per cent of Gaza’s residents depend almost entirely on foreign assistance for their daily needs. In the longer term, Palestinians must be allowed to develop their own means of cultivating economic growth and development. By deliberately cutting off hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, not just from economic exchange but from many of the essentials of modern life, Israel advances no one’s interests – particularly not its own.