2025 February-March Turning Point

March 2, 2025. The day a new blockade was imposed on Gaza.
“Humanitarian aid and supplies have not entered the Gaza Strip since March 2, when the Israeli authorities imposed a siege. This siege has now lasted over three weeks, surpassing the duration of the total siege first imposed in October 2023 when the war started. As a result, critical humanitarian supplies, including food and medical aid, are rapidly depleting.”
Source : ReliefWeb, UNRWA. https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/unrwa-situation-report-165-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem-all-information-updated-19-25-march-2025

As a humanitarian non-governmental organization, we have been supporting a family in Gaza since January 2024, one of the thousands of families who were forcibly displaced and lost everything they had in the process. They have been known to us for over a decade. He used to be a well-respected university teacher, appreciated by all his students, for his kindness, open mind, and gentle humour.

No message from them for a month, since the end of February. The little electricity they had was cut, along with the delivery of food. Finally, a short message came yesterday, March 29.

“Yes, not enough food due to the last escalation. We are eating much less, and same food, rice or red lentils. No net in my area. There is shelling now. I am using an esim on the roof. Will go down soon.”

One whole months without direct news. As for the media, it is a global blackout. Unbelievable. You look for figures, facts, you type “food trucks into Gaza”, and you find practically nothing, the last articles or videos being dated January or February 2025.

Blackout : “temporary loss of consciousness”.

“Great is the truth, but still greater, from a pratical point of view is silence about truth.
By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an ‘iron curtain’ between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively…” Aldous Huxley, 1946 Foreword to Brave New World.

For goodness sake, there has been deliberate starving of a whole population for a month now, on a level far worse and longer than in October 2023, and not a voice has been heard about it in the mainstream channels ? Is this where we’re at, in the spring of 2025, in the West, Business As Usual, starting with the emperor’s new haircut, the vice-emperor’s visit to the Norsemen’s arctic lands, and more nonsense about renaming channels and gulfs ?

Looking at things and situations worldwide from a given place and angle, we had to question the range and validity of our sources, starting with the inverted earthquakes of January 15, 2025, when war at last stopped in Gaza, and March 18, when it resumed.

Could we have been limited and biased in our perception and framing of reality ?

Take the case of two different friends, one living in the West, a regular reader of a partisan newspaper founded by Jaurès in 1904, the other living in the Middle East, who would daily get his dose of Qatari news, for thirty years, and little else. How could we trust their evaluation of events, based on such a restrictive set of views, opinions ? How could we get into any open, constructive dialogue ?

Until the end of January 2025, we took some pride in scanning not just a couple or a few, but a dozen news outlets daily, from the left-wing Israeli Haaretz to the right-wing Israel National News, adding Al Monitor, with the occasional forays into The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, the BBC, et al.

It then struck us that there had to be other sources in the Middle East – or was this once called ‘Holy Land’ a lonely island in a desolate (Atlantic) ocean ?

As a result of this shift in the quest of complementarity, our three main daily sources, in March, remain YNet News, Haaretz, the Times of Israel, followed by Egypt Today, the Jordan Times, and Al Arabiya, leaving Al Monitor behind due to its extension of pay tolls. Plus a dozen other sources – among them, UN News, L’Orient Today, Anadolu Ajansi…

“Complementarity, in its most basic form, is the concept that one single thing, when considered from different perspectives, can seem to have very different or even contradictory properties.” Nobel Physics laureate Frank Wilczek, Complementarity is mind-expanding, Ch. 10 of his 2021 essay, Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality.

Does this entail a radical change of orientation ? Rather, a cartesian, methodical approach, once you are “constrained to avow that, of all the opinions that I once accepted as true, there is not one which is not now legitimately open to doubt, not through any lack of reflection or lightness of judgement, but for very strong and deeply considered reasons.” Descartes, About the Things We May Doubt. Simply.