A week in Gaza

From the Guardian:

This week George Bush flies to the Middle East in another effort to revive peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

But the one subject that won't be on their agenda is Gaza, the small, overcrowded strip of land sliding ever deeper into economic catastrophe.

All this week the Guardian reports on the effects of the crisis on the ordinary people of Gaza.

Watch videos and read reports here >

Gaza fuel, cooking gas shortages beginning to bite

From IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:

Intense political divisions in the Gaza Strip have split people on most issues, except one: the situation has never been worse, nearly everyone agrees.

"I never remember Gaza being this bad," said one man in his early 40s. "Living here has become a game of survival." With fuel supplies nearly dry, many people no longer have cooking gas in their homes, leading some to search for alternative methods to make a meal.

"People now are starting to look through the garbage to find combustibles," a Gazan who works for a large international aid organisation told IRIN.

Read the entire article here >

Latest from the U.N.: More on the Gaza sewage crisis

From the recent U.N. report "Impact of Fuel Shortages on Gaza Sanitation – Polluting the Sea":

Gaza’s water authority, the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), is responsible for providing water to the residents of the Gaza Strip as well as managing its sewage. It provides more than 130 million cubic metres of drinking water per year to the residents of Gaza. Around 80 percent of this becomes sewage which consists of household and commercial effluent. The closure on Gaza and the reduction in fuel and electric supply have forced the CMWU to dump 60 million litres of raw and partially treated sewage into the Mediterranean Sea to avoid flooding residential areas.

Read the entire report here >

Updates from Gaza

News articles from May 2:

The Independent: Blockade puts Gaza on brink of serious food crisis, says UN

Destitution and food insecurity among Gaza's 1.5 million residents has reached an unprecedentedly critical level, according to unpublished UN findings that they now need "urgent assistance" to avert a "serious food crisis" in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The report revealing that Gaza's population has already passed the internationally-agreed threshold at which it needs concerted measures to prevent a "deterioration in their nutrition" has been drafted on the eve of a donors' conference to discuss Palestinian political and economic prospects in London today. Read the entire article here >

Ha'aretz: Gaza sewage pumped into the sea over past three months

Millions of liters of sewage have been released over the past three months into the Mediterranean Sea from the Gaza Strip, according to a new United Nations report.

According to the report, an estimated 50-60 million liters of waste per day have been pumped into the sea. This was done in an effort to prevent an overflow of sewage in residential areas.

Normally, the sewage is pumped to prearranged sites for treatment, but the shortage of fuel in the Gaza Strip has caused disruptions in the supply of electricity. These shortages, lack of sufficient quantities of chemicals necessary for treating sewage, and spare parts, has led the Gaza officials to pump the waste into the sea. Read the entire article here >

‘Our Dreams Are Dead’: Violence in Gaza gets the headlines. But the slow suffocation of the West Bank should get more attention too.

From Newsweek:

To spend a week among the Palestinians in the West Bank, as I recently did, is grounds for antidepressants. Not half enough has been written about what is going on there. The violence in Gaza gets almost daily press—more border attacks and rockets launched into Israel, a new retaliatory body count (including, just this week, a mother and four young children killed during an Israeli operation in northern Gaza)—but the slow suffocation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, in every village in the West Bank, gets scant attention. "Our dreams are dead," says Ali Asamil Abkhrka, a bead vendor outside a Bethlehem restaurant. "There can never be peace with the Israelis. Never." A Palestinian policeman in the Church of the Nativity echoes him: "The wall closes the earth, closes the life. Everything is going backward."

Consider the Israeli travel restrictions. No Palestinian living in the West Bank is allowed to enter Jerusalem without written permission from the Israeli government. Islah Jad lives in Ramallah and is an associate professor in gender studies at Birzeit University. When her sisters visited her recently from Egypt, they wanted to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque. Dr. Jad went to a nearby Israeli settlement to apply for a permit. "Come back tomorrow," they said. She went back. "It's not ready. Come back tomorrow," she was told. The third time she came home without a permission slip, she gave up. "Why waste a week for a permit for a few hours," she told me. "It's humiliating." Her sisters went to Jerusalem without her.

The license plate is key. Palestinians living outside Jerusalem in Ramallah or Bethlehem or anywhere in the West Bank have green and white license plates and are forbidden to drive on the smooth, wide "settler" roads that link the necklace of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Palestinians who live in Jerusalem have yellow license plates and are allowed on the roads, but such an apparent privilege is muted at the checkpoints, some 500 of them. The blue and white ID cards, which all Israelis and Palestinians carry, identify the bearer's religion and ethnicity. The Israelis are waved through. The Palestinians are pulled aside. "As soon as they see Arabic on the ID card they say, 'Security'," says Najwa, a lovely young Palestinian woman who works in a Jerusalem hotel. "We have to pull over, and they go through the luggage, the glove compartment, the papers of everybody in the car. It can take hours to get through. I have friends in Ramallah whom I haven't seen in years. The hassle is just too great."

The checkpoints have personalities of their own. The direct road from Jerusalem to Ramallah has been blocked by the wall, funneling the traffic through twisty, rutted roads to the Qalandya checkpoint. Getting through the checkpoint to enter the Palestinian city of Ramallah is easy. Getting back is not. Unless they have yellow plates, Palestinians with permission to travel to Jerusalem have to leave their cars on the Palestinian side, walk through a series of security turnstiles on foot, show their papers to the Israeli soldier on duty and then, if cleared, continue their journeys in so-called service cars, beat-up yellow vans jammed to overflowing. The checkpoint on the direct road to Bethlehem is closed to Palestinians altogether.

Despair is the word I hear most often from West Bank Palestinians, 58 percent of whom have fallen below the poverty line. "I can't get work from the Israeli side because I am haram [forbidden], and the Palestinians can't even afford to pay me bus fare," says an architect reduced to working in a bookstore. The night offers particular terrors. Jad, who works late, recognizes the sounds of frequent Israeli raids, "explosions and hard beats on doors and screams," she says.

Read the entire article here>

Palestinian & Israeli human rights groups: Siege of Gaza violates international law

From Ynet:

Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations issued a joint statement Tuesday, demanding that Israel lift all the restrictions imposed on the transfer of fuel into the Gaza Strip.

According to the statement, these restrictions "severely and unprecedentedly harm the health and welfare of the Strip's residents," while "seriously violating international law."

In the statement, the groups expressed their "deep concern and harsh protest in light of the systematic harm caused to vital civil systems in the Gaza Strip, which are facing a complete collapse due to the limitation of the amounts of fuel Israel has been allowing the residents and institutions in the Gaza Strip to purchase for six months now.

"The fuel shortage in the Gaza Strip, which is under Israeli occupation and which Israel is responsible for by proxy of occupation laws, harms the electricity production in the Strip, as well as the activity of hospitals, private and public transportation, the water pumps and sewerages. "The shortage damages the social and economic basic needs of the 1.5 million residents of Gaza," the statement said.

The rights organizations also mentioned the harm caused to Israeli civilians, calling on "militant groups in Gaza to refrain from attacking civilians, including in the crossings through which fuel, food and other goods are transferred into the Gaza Strip."

The statement was issued by Al-Haq, Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Al Dameer Association for Human Rights – Gaza, Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, Gisha - Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, Hamoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Yesh Din: Volunteers for Human Rights.

Read the entire statement here >

UN suspends Gaza food deliveries

From al Jazeera English:

The UN has suspended food aid deliveries in the besieged Gaza Strip due to fuel shortages.

The United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA), which distributes food and essential commodities to nearly two-thirds of Gaza's population, had earlier warned it expected to run out of fuel for its lorries by Thursday afternoon.

The last shipment of fuel to Gaza by Israel - the sole distributor of it to the territory - came before Palestinian fighters attacked an Israeli fuel depot on April 9.

An emergency shipment of fuel for UNRWA lorries from within Gaza was reportedly intercepted on Thursday by angry strawberry farmers who needed the supplies for irrigation and refrigeration.

"It's something that we've been warning about since early April, and that is what is so tragic," John Ging, head of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, told Al Jazeera.

"Now we're at a standstill - we just don't have the fuel to operate the trucks.

"We have the food, and we certainly have hundreds of thousands of desperate people who need it. But this is the situation tonight."

to read the entire report>http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/077A1B84-572C-40CE-98B0-676EAF8122FE.htm