GAZA: Only a few years ago the bright yellow and orange al-Awda Factory for Biscuits and Ice Cream was a vibrant business and one of the largest factories in the Palestinian territories. Today, like most private firms in the Gaza Strip, it is in dire trouble.Only one of four production lines is working. There are barely two-dozen staff producing packets of hazelnut-flavoured wafers. There is not enough ink to print a sell-by date, not enough cardboard boxes to hold the packets, not enough plastic to wrap the boxes. When the wafers are delivered, they arrive at stores in old fruit cartons. Sales are down to 25 per cent of what they were eight years ago. And this is a good day – for the previous week all production lines were shut down for want of ingredients, packaging and spare parts.

The factors that have brought the biscuit factory to such a parlous state will be one of many unenviable Middle East challenges awaiting the new president.

Since the Islamist movement Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006 and then took full control of Gaza last year, Israel has gradually increased the pressure on what it calls the “hostile entity”. It has severely limited imports and prohibited all exports. Few of Gaza’s 1.5 million people can ever leave. Despite this, Hamas grows steadily stronger, not weaker.

Like many Gazans, Mohammed Telbani, the factory’s general manager, says he has little interest in the election. “Presidents have changed but no one did anything for us,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. He doubts that a new president will have the power or the will to reverse decades of US policy in the Middle East which he, like most here, sees as decisively pro-Israeli. “Without pressure on Israel there won’t be any solution to the problem,” he said.If they had to choose, most Palestinians, like most other Arabs, would probably side with Obama (and, conversely, opinion polls show more Israelis would side with McCain). Gazans talk urgently about the need to lift the economic blockade of the strip, to allow the crossings to open and the economy to restart. Palestinians as a whole simply want Washington to play a much tougher role as a Middle East peace broker, bringing concrete change and eventually that much-promised independent Palestinian state.—Dawn/Guardian News Service