Gaza Threat Alert: Rockets with Macaroni Warheads

Really. McClatchy News Service reports:

For more than seven weeks, the international aid group Mercy Corps has been trying to send 90 tons of macaroni to the isolated Gaza Strip as part of a global campaign to help the 1.4 million Palestinians there rebuild their lives after Israel's recent devastating 22-day military operation.

Israel, which controls most of what goes into and out of Gaza, has said no repeatedly.

On Wednesday, days after American lawmakers raised pointed questions about the macaroni ban, Israeli authorities said that they were preparing to give the pasta a green light.

At first, Israeli officials said that they wanted to make sure that the macaroni wasn't destined for a Hamas charity. Then they said macaroni was banned because they didn't consider it an essential food item.

Representative Brian Baird, who just visited Gaza, offered the key military challenge: ""Is someone going to kill you with a piece of macaroni?"

Here are other items that pose imminent danger and thus have been blocked by Israel:

Lentils
Paper
Crayons
Tomato Paste

Readers with far more scientific minds than mind can design weapons of mass destribution from this list. However, there might be a more prosaic political explanation Israel's continued economic stranglehold on Gaza:

"We want to make sure that reconstruction for the people of Gaza is not reconstruction for the Hamas regime," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.