KHAN YUNIS (Gaza Strip): It’s blazing hot every day; the electricity comes and goes. And when there’s no electricity, there’s no water. Nobody has any money, but everyone, it seems, has a weapon. The Israelis left the Gaza Strip last fall. But now they seem to be everywhere at once -— on the ground, in the air and even on the other end of the telephone as a voice warning civilians in accented Arabic of impending missile strikes.
There’s no way out. The borders are closed for months at a time to all but foreign passport holders and those with political connections. “We’re living in one big prison,” said Sulaiman abu Samhadana, whose employees at the Gaza electric company face daily abuse and threats as they cut off power to neighbourhoods to stretch the limited supply. Tensions are rising among the heavily armed residents of Gaza, say doctors, police and mental health professionals here. Men are beating their wives and fighting with their neighbours. Families are living on the generosity of relatives and credit from merchants, both of which are starting to run dry.
Youth are turning to petty crime. In Khan Yunis, a gritty southern Gaza city that features a thriving gunrunning trade, Brig Gen. Mustafa Wafi’s police force struggles to keep up. “People have a lot of weapons, and the slightest things set them off,” he said. Thefts, burglaries and violent neighbourhood arguments in Gaza City have risen 70% in recent months, one police officer estimated. Many of the new offenders are teenagers whose families can no longer provide spending money. Their favourite targets: car stereos, generators and especially cellphones.
“It used to be one or two cases a day in our area. Now it’s at least four or five,” said the officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. “It started once the salaries stopped being paid.”
The wave of euphoria that swept Gaza after last fall’s Israeli withdrawal and January’s landslide electoral victory by the militant group Hamas has dissipated. Hamas’ election prompted a US-backed cutoff of aid to the Palestinian government, the area’s major employer, with an aim of forcing the Islamist group to soften its stance on Israel.
The Palestinian economy has virtually stopped. Unemployment in Gaza has reached 40 per cent, up from 23 per cent before Hamas’ election, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. A May study by the World Bank concluded that estimate might be “too rosy.” Civil servants, including the police, haven’t been paid in full for five months. Garbage collectors stopped working early this summer in a salary dispute.
Electricity has been rationed since Israeli jets bombed the main power station in late June at the start of an incursion triggered when Palestinian guerrillas crossed the border and captured an Israeli soldier, who is still missing. Since then, frequent air strikes and artillery barrages have further frayed the nerves of Gazans. More than 170 Palestinians have been killed, according to the United Nations. “The mood here changed dramatically” once the Israeli military offensive began, said John Ging, Gaza chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Before June, he said, “there was a stoicism. There was an attitude that [economic hardship] was something that had to be accepted.”
For many here, their happiest memories of the last year have been the times they managed to get out of Gaza. Last fall, soon after Israeli troops and settlers completed their withdrawal, residents knocked a hole in the border fence with Egypt. Tens of thousands of Gaza residents poured through, flooding the Egyptian city of El Arish and buying up everything in sight.
Now the strip is virtually sealed. Almost all Gaza residents are barred from entering Israel, and the border crossing with Egypt has been closed for most of the last two months, turning the entire coastal strip into a slow-burning impoverished prison.
