Anyone who has any relationship with the people of the Gaza Strip knows Buma Inbar. Inbar, a bereaved father whose son was killed with the IDF in Lebanon in 1995 and who lives in Neve Monosson, is a one man relief organization, providing private aid to Gazans, particularly those who are hospitalized in Israel. Long years of voluntary activity on the route between Sheba Hospital and the Erez checkpoint have made him an expert on civilian affairs inside the Gaza Strip. For most of us Israelis, Gaza means a source of a security threat. For him, it's a place in need of help and compassion.
Last week, Buma revealed to me a surprising fact. "Do you know how much a manual laborer in the Gaza Strip earns?" he asked me. I did a simple calculation. If in Israel it's usual to pay NIS 300 for a day's work, the Gazan will presumably get NIS 100. Maybe NIS 80. But I sensed a hidden trap in his question, and didn't rush to answer. "Well, how much?", I asked. "NIS 10 a day," was the reply.
The Gaza Strip has 1.8 million residents, and their dependence on Israel is overwhelming. Israel can decide whether to launch an attack there, or to open the gates to exports from the Gaza Strip and to workers who will earn a living and return home with cash. When it wants, Israel sells electricity to the Gaza Strip, and when it needs to, it bombards the power station there. The annual budget of the government in the Gaza Strip is around $1 billion. The Palestinian Authority transfers to the Gaza Strip most of the revenue of the government there, paying government employees and helping to buy fuel. The EU supports civilian projects, and pays the salaries of hundreds of doctors, teachers and nurses. When necessary, belts are tightened, and the salaries of the 40,000 government officials are cut. Hamas manages to collect a few million more thanks to taxes imposed on workers and goods.
But the reality of life there is shaped by war. The Gaza Strip is a land battered by military blows, with an unemployment rate of over 40%, negative economic growth, and an economic horizon that exists only in the imagination. "Fortunately for them," says an Israeli familiar with life there, "the Gazans are capable of living just on pita, olive oil and zatar. You can buy 50 pitas for seven shekels there. The price hasn't changed for years."
A cruel pattern
The Gaza Strip has undergone one of the most wretched decades in its history. True, in the summer of 2005 the Israeli settlements there were evacuated in a historic step by the government of Ariel Sharon, but since then a cruel pattern has been set that has turned the lives of its inhabitants upside down. The pattern is that on average every two years they are hit by war or a fierce armed confrontation that destroys any sign of recovery there might be.
Two years after Israel vacated the Gaza Strip, the Hamas movement staged a military coup and took control of the government there for the first time in its history. The coup was carried out with great violence, directed against the representatives of the existing Fatah regime. A year and a half later, Israel began a blitz that was called Operation Cast Lead, in which hundreds of targets the length and breadth of the Gaza Strip were attacked. This campaign ended in January 2009. The Hamas government rehabilitated the ruined houses, and even compensated families that had been made homeless.
From that point, the Gazans knew three and a half years of relative stability and cautious optimism, punctuated by isolated days of tension with Israel and Egypt, which did not deteriorate into broad hostilities. In Cairo they were even in for a pleasant surprise, in the shape of the coming to power of Hamas's parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. In the summer of 2012, for the first time in Egypt's history, a president representing the Muslim Brotherhood was actually elected. The Gaza Strip was euphoric, but then came the winter of 2012, and another blow landed: Operation Pillar of Cloud. This campaign, which lasted a week, was fiercer than any of its predecessors. It opened with the assassination of Ahmed Jabari, a senior figure in Hamas's military wing. At its height, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen managed to threaten Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with their rockets, but they thereby stoked Israel's anger and brought about greater pressure on the Gaza Strip.
At the end of that campaign, Hamas recorded a considerable humanitarian achievement. It forced Israel to remove some of the sanctions imposed as part of the blockade. First of all, construction materials were allowed in, admittedly under supervision, and the band of water in which fishing was allowed off the Gaza coast was doubled in width from three to six miles. Israel even showed flexibility over agricultural work, and allowed Gazan farmers to work their lands close to the border fence, in areas which they had previously been forbidden to approach.
Unexpected blow
For all the blows dealt it by Israel, the Gaza Strip still managed to live, but then Hamas suffered the greatest blow of all. It came from an unexpected direction. In July 2013, their patron Mohamad Morsi was deposed as president of Egypt, and with him all representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood were cleared out of the corridors of power. Morsi was replaced by the minister of defense, Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi. El-Sisi's reconquest of power was also the moment of vengeance for the army officers' regime. Evidence they held since the first days of the coup against Hosni Mubarak showed that activists of the military wing of Hamas played a central role in the murder of warders in prisons from which political prisoners escaped. Cairo was weakened, its hold on far-flung parts of the country was being loosened, and in the Sinai peninsula extreme groups were starting to establish themselves and carry out murderous attacks on Egyptian police and government installations. Some of them gained support from the Hamas military wing. A deadly account was opened between Cairo and Gaza.
The Gazan government felt the revenge sharply in its coffers. The Egyptians linked up with Israel, and the two countries began a joint effort to block the tunnels at the Rafah-Sinai border. These tunnels were not just an arms smuggling channel. They were also Gaza's outlet port to the outside world. The tunnels enterprise employed thousands: clerks, smugglers, builders, and of course traders large and small. It brought Ismail Haniyeh's government some $220 million annually, about a fifth of its annual budget. While the official crossing at Rafah on the Sinai border kept opening and closing according to the mood of the government in Cairo, trade flourished in the tunnels. From the moment they were shut down, the Gaza Strip's economic ties with Egypt were severed, and it became utterly dependent on Israel.
"Everything went via the tunnels," a resident of Khan Younis told "Globes", "They brought in goods from Egypt, construction materials, vehicles, even animals. Egyptian fuel is half the price of Israeli fuel. Anyone who wanted to go to Egypt paid $100 and went. The contractors who built the tunnels became millionaires."
A few months went by after the coup in Egypt, and a fresh blow landed on Gaza. The IDF discovered a tunnel opening in Israeli territory, parallel to Khan Younis, and about a kilometer from Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha. The tunnel was intended to serve a squad of the military wing of Hamas in penetrating into Israel. It was well constructed, with concrete sides, and dug several hundred meters into Israeli territory. Following this discovery, Minister of Defense Moshe Ya'alon decided to ban the movement of construction materials into the Gaza Strip for the private sector. The construction industry in the Gaza Strip is a focus of considerable attention in Israel, and in fact is considered a matter of extremely high importance from a security point of view. Hamas used construction materials to set up a network of subterranean tunnels, much of which has been exposed in Operation Protective Edge.
The IDF knew about Hamas's attack tunnels and their danger before the current conflict. Because of that, with the discovery of the tunnel at Ein Hashlosha, building projects in the Gaza Strip, of which there were about 270, came to an immediate halt. Israel allowed only ten projects to continue, most of them by the UN or communal projects by the Qatari government. The construction industry, which represented 28% of the Gaza Strip's gross domestic product, came to an almost complete standstill with the closure of the tunnels to Egypt and the embargo imposed by Israel. According to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, before the Egyptian coup the industry employed about 24,000 people. Today, it employs just 6,800. The crisis in the industry contributed greatly to the steep rise in unemployment.
Other areas of the economy were hit besides construction. Farmers are not allowed to work lands close to the Israeli border, in a well-defined security zone. Fishermen can go out to sea only six miles from the shore. Exporters, such as tomato, flower, and strawberry growers, sell their products only overseas, because Israel forbids their sale in its territory. The Palestinian exporter has to bear extra costs involved in shipping to Europe via Ben Gurion Airport or the Allenby Bridge.
"Unless a desalination plant is built in the Gaza Strip, a humanitarian crisis is likely to develop there because of a shortage of water," adds an Israeli expert in civilian relations with the Gaza Strip, "There are already 400 illegal wells there today. They are drinking groundwater that is partly contaminated."
Much has been written about the power industry in the Gaza Strip. In this area too, the reality was grim even before the current round of fighting, and has become worse since it began. Each day, the power supply is cut to another area for seven or eight hours on average. When there is a shortage of diesel, or when technical breakdowns occur, there can be power outages for fifteen hours.
The Gazans obtain power from three sources. They buy 17% of their needs from Egypt, half from Israel, and the rest they generate themselves. But the power plant in the Gaza Strip has sustained airborne attacks by Israel in recent years (the latest last Wednesday), and suffers from operational breakdowns and a shortage of diesel fuel, for which there are various reasons, mostly political. The result: "Who relies on the power supply?", says the same Khan Younis source, "Everyone has a generator. The problem is that this machine causes a lot of accidents. Dozens of people have been killed or injured in fires caused by generators that have not been operated properly."
Since the latest tension with Hamas started after the abduction and murder of the three Israeli teenagers, Israel has restricted even further the passage of civilian goods such as food, fuel and medicines into the Gaza Strip. Iman Jabbour, research director at the Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, points out that other products, such as clothes, wood and paper are also banned. "Exporting has been altogether impossible since then," she says.
"Not at the expense of 1.8 million people
Gisha executive director Eitan Diamond believes that the main problem for the people of the Gaza Strip the day after the fighting ends will be the heavy damage to infrastructures. "Clearly what will be needed first of all will be a massive rehabilitation operation, especially if one takes into account that the state of the infrastructure there was poor in the first place. The water in the Gaza Strip is mostly not fit to drink, the sewage system is in a fragile state, and the power supply even on calm days is inadequate. The day after the battle there will be a great deal of work, and this will require Israel to reconsider the restrictions it imposes, chiefly on bringing construction materials into the Gaza Strip."
Diamond is not oblivious to Israel's security considerations, but he points out that the security forces in any case apply strict controls. "Israel has the right, even the obligation, to protect its people, but this cannot come at the expense of 1.8 million Gazans," he says.
From day one of the fighting, the heads of Hamas have insisted on the lifting of the blockade on the Gaza Strip. Last Wednesday, Khaled Mashaal presented this as a condition for a cease-fire. This is the minimum that Hamas can offer people who have suffered a collective trauma, and have lost over a thousand of their loved ones. This demand is also directed towards Egypt, which uses the opening and closing of the Rafah crossing as a means of exerting pressure on the Hamas regime. Jerusalem is wary of acceding to the demand, but there are those who think that doing so is in Israel's interests.
"We called for the blockade to be lifted from the first day it was imposed," says Diamond, "Its political aim, the toppling of Hamas, has not been achieved, while those who are hurt are the civilian population. As a mechanism for dividing the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, it is unreasonable, because it splits the Palestinian territory in a way that separates family members and strangles the economy. As a ploy for weakening Hamas it is an illegitimate measure. Its results are debatable, but few experts will claim that it has yielded positive results for the population of Israel."
The author is the Arab affairs correspondent for “IDF Radio" (Galei Zahal).
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 27, 2014
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2013