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Gazans Fear Crisis After Four Days of Blockade
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Israel has limited the flow of supplies to Gaza since Hamas seized power here in June, routing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, Hamas's partner in a short-lived unity government. Stores of medicine, fuel and other staples had dwindled even before the blockade, Palestinian doctors and engineers here said.
Shlomo Dror, spokesman for Israel's Coordinator of Activities in the Territories, has said repeatedly since Friday that Israel would not allow a humanitarian crisis to occur in Gaza.
By Monday, however, the people of Gaza had had more than a glimpse of what such a crisis would look like.
Gas stations had closed, having exhausted their fuel supplies. Some bakeries had run out of flour.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which distributes food rations to 860,000 Palestinian refugees in Gaza, said Monday that without fuel it would have to suspend operations by Friday. The World Food Program, whose rations help feed another 270,000 Gaza residents, said it would have to stop distributions by Thursday unless it gets more fuel.
The Gaza Strip's power plant, which supplies electricity to about 500,000 people in Gaza City and elsewhere, ran out of fuel Sunday night and was shut down, Palestinians in charge of the electrical system said.
The power plant provided about 25 percent of Gaza's total electricity.
Five power lines from Israel supply another 70 percent, Palestinian and Israeli officials said. Except for one power line damaged before this week, the Israeli power supply to Gaza has not been affected, Israeli and Palestinian authorities said.
However, there is little connection between the grids that carry the electricity from the power plant and the grids that carry Israeli power, said Rafiq Maliha, the project manager of the power plant.
Additionally, the Gaza City network is operated manually, requiring a worker to throw a breaker to connect each area, Maliha said. That makes it difficult to feed electricity from other networks to the one that had been supplied by the power plant.
Power at the main Gaza City hospital came on without notice Monday afternoon, for the first time in about 18 hours. Gaza City moved in and out of blackout through Monday night.
"Gaza is dying slowly," said Ahmed Bahar, a Hamas official, with "an international silence, an Arab silence."
