UN demands end to Palestinian blockade

The lights went out on the Gaza Strip last night when the only electricity plant in the seaside territory closed down after Israel severed fuel supplies.

As the power failed, 1,000 men, women and children held a candlelit procession in Gaza City to protest at the breakdown of their basic services. Some carried posters calling on the international community to come to their aid, others condemned the state of siege that they are living under.

“I appeal to Egypt to break the siege because our children and sick people are dying,” Umm Raed, a 52-year-old housewife, said. Egypt has a border with Gaza, but has mainly shown solidarity with Israel in enforcing an embargo on the Hamas-run territory.

As mobile phone repeaters ran out of power, mobile phones started to lose reception, plunging many areas into silence as well as blackness.

Unable to end the ceaseless volleys of rockets fired by Gaza hardliners into its southern towns and farms, Israel cut off diesel supplies to the Strip, where 1.5 million Palestinians live, in an attempt to force its Islamist rulers to end the attacks.

The moderate Palestinian Prime Minister of the West Bank administration cautioned that Israel was doing nothing to fulfil its pledges to freeze Jewish settlement expansion and ease restrictions that have strangled the economy there.

Officials in Hamas-run Gaza said that the cut in power threatened basic services and posed a health threat because councils were unlikely to be able to pump water, treat sewage, dispose of rubbish or cater for hospital laundry services. The hospitals in Gaza have emergency generators, but would have to curb other services.

Israel said that the Hamas rulers of Gaza – who are hostile to the existence of the Jewish state, and fought a bitter, brief war with the more moderate Fatah movement last year – should concentrate on ending the rocket fire and providing services.

As darkness fell last night, reports broke of the latest Israeli airstrike against militants firing rockets into Israel. Hamas officials said that at least one person was killed and one critically injured in the attack.

Aid groups denounced the blockade, which they said punishes civilians for the actions of militant groups. “The logic of this defies basic humanitarian standards,” Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency, said.

Avi Dichter, the Israeli Public Security Minister, said that the town of Sderot, which is close to the Gaza border and has been hit by hundreds of rockets in recent weeks, was close to collapse.

“The Government must instruct the [Israeli Army] to eliminate the rocket fire from Gaza entirely. These attacks need not be minimised or managed, but stopped completely, irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians,” he told the Cabinet yesterday.

With the prospects in Gaza looking bleaker than ever, Salaam Fayyad, the moderate Prime Minister of the West Bank administration, said that Israel was failing in its pledge to freeze settlement expansion in the West Bank.

“The one thing that really matters the most to us is settlement expansion,” he said. Mr Fayyad added that Israel had also failed to do anything to relax its system of security checkpoints and road closures in the West Bank and that it was threatening the recovery prospects offered by international donors who pledged more than $7 billion (£3.6 billion) in aid.

Mr Fayyad, who leaves for London tonight to meet Gordon Brown, also admitted that he had feared the West Bank administration was about to fall to Hamas hardliners last summer, just as Gaza had. He said that the Palestinian Authority had made significant progress in rebuilding its security forces since the Gaza debacle, but more needed to be done.

In Jerusalem, Israeli ministers called for the assassination of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, after he boasted yesterday that his forces possessed the body parts of Israeli soldiers left on the battlefield in the 2006 war, which he planned to exchange for prisoners. Yitzhak Cohen, of the Shas party, said: “Nasrallah is a madman and I don’t understand why he’s still breathing.”

Pressure points

- Gaza uses 200 megawatts of electricity, 65 megawatts coming from the local power plant, which is supplied by Israeli fuel oil

- 120 megawatts come directly from Israel and the rest from Egypt

- Between them, Egypt and Israel control all the routes into Gaza

- Attempts to circumvent the blockade have been hampered by $23 million (£12 million) in US military aid to Egypt to help to detect Hamas tunnels

- 2,300 people were given leave to travel from Gaza via Egypt to the Haj last year

- After Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections, Israel suspended payments of taxes and customs due to the Palestinian Authority – so for 15 months civil servants received reduced or no wages

- In the West Bank, 38 per cent of the territory is taken up by Israeli infrastructure, with more than 500 checkpoints and obstacles

Sources: WHO; B’Tselem; Ochaopt.org; agencies

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