Gaza

I don't often read Melanie Phillips, not because I think she is wrong, but because she is obsessive and I tend to mistrust obsessives. But in the Spectator she quotes the excellent Tom Gross:

... 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

He suggests that perhaps the Turkish aid convoy was going in the wrong direction.

Gross' article is written as the EU approves massive new funds for Gaza, much of which, he says, goes towards armaments. He has photos of a new shopping centre in Gaza. This is not the sort of stuff you see on the BBC, which continually refers to Gazans as 'refugees'.