The need for aid in Gaza

Hundreds of Palestinians each day can now cross the border with Egypt, but those who remain face poverty and deprivation, writes MICHAEL JANSENin Gaza

THE PASSENGER CROSSING between Gaza and Egypt is a chaotic throng of Palestinians seeking to escape desperation: women and children, students, an old gent in a wheelchair needing medical treatment. While the Egyptians may open the gate once a month, this is not certain, so Gazans seek to come and go during this extraordinary period.

Cars, buses, motorbikes, an ambulance and donkey carts mill around, raising dust, while people brandish their exit permissions at blue-suited policemen guarding the gate. But only those processed and allowed to board five buses in Gaza City at 5am have passed the iron gates into the Palestinian terminal. The magic number is 400 – a day.

Human-rights researcher Fadel Mazzani, who seeks to go to Cairo to defend his doctoral dissertation, says that only people who presented themselves at 1am found a place. Still he is hopeful. “I have been sent back five times.”

Nuha Abu Shamala, an IT graduate from Rafah, who has a visa for Morocco, telephones her father to come and fetch her.

Inside the cool, quiet terminal, documents are examined at a snail’s pace. Linda, a pretty bride of two months, arrived with the buses at 6am. At 10am she is patiently waiting for her turn at immigration.

“I’m going to join my husband in Australia,” she says. “He’s an airline pilot.”

People are desperate to leave because Gaza is so poor, and growing poorer by the moment. Prices are rising by the season, and more and more people are losing their jobs.

The market at Khan Yunis, half an hour by car from Rafah, is well stocked with locally grown tomatoes, potatoes, okra, oranges and bananas, and Israeli grapes and apricots. While tomatoes and potatoes are cheap – $1 (€0.80) for four kilos – the rest are $5 (€4) a kilo. At a stall selling frozen beef and turkey from Brazil, the butcher cuts a nugget of meat as large as a small apple for a boy shopping for his mother.

Umm Ragheb, a middle-aged woman in black, only her eyes exposed, is empty-handed. “Everything is very expensive,” she says. “People who have money buy; others look.” She has a dozen children. Ragheb, her eldest son, has nine. “He has no work. There is no work.”

Some of Gaza’s population eat one meal a day, others eat every other day. Eighty per cent of Gaza’s one and a half million people live below the poverty line of $2 a day, and

61 per cent are “food insecure”. Fifty thousand people were made homeless by Israel’s 2008-09 offensive.

The driver takes us slowly through the pleasant town of Deir al-Balah, avoiding the lumps and potholes in the road, slowing in knots of traffic as generators clack at us from shopfronts (power is cut for six or seven hours a day every day).

The Gaza power plant functions at less than capacity because of a lack of fuel, while power supplies from Israel and Egypt cannot meet demand.

As the taxi swings on to the seafront road – the world’s oldest thoroughfare in continuous use – the breeze fills the vehicle with the stench of sewage flowing raw into the sea, polluting the entire coast.

At Beit Hanoun, in the north, flat wooden donkey carts process along the sandy shoulder of the ragged road. Most are laden with bleached white sacks filled with rubble from blasted buildings. Three 15-year-old boys have a dozen sacks. “We’ll get 10 shekels [€2] a sack,” says one as he urges his donkey on.

At the factory where rubble is mixed with sand and a little cement smuggled in from Egypt, the yard is filled with drying breeze blocks, rough and fragile at the same time.

“This material should not be used for building houses,” says Salah, an architect. “It is good for paving roads. We need concrete and reinforcing iron bars, but Israel does not let them enter. What we get from the

tunnels is too little and too expensive. We cannot rebuild with this. We need hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement and concrete. We have so little land that we must build multistoreyed blocks.”