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Gaza reels from lockdown
20/01/2008 13:41 - (SA)
Gaza City - The Gaza Strip reeled from power outages on Sunday as Israel continued to block supplies including fuel from entering the impoverished territory run by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
For the third consecutive day, border crossings of the coastal strip where most of the 1.5 million residents depend on aid remained shut after Israel ordered the move amid an escalation of violence between the army and Islamists.
The Israeli cabinet decided to keep the lockdown in place for now after discussing the measure in its weekly government meeting on Sunday, officials said.
The decision was taken despite warnings that the move could lead to a humanitarian crisis in one of the world's most densely-populated territories.
"The ministers discussed the ongoing closure during the cabinet meeting, but decided to keep up the pressure," a senior government official told AFP.
Amid dwindling fuel supplies, Gaza's sole power plant that provides up to a third of the coastal strip's electricity, shut down one of its two turbines early on Sunday and was due to turn off the second one by the end of the day, officials said.
"This morning we turned off one of the two turbines that remained working," station director Rafiq Mliha told AFP. "If we don't receive fuel we will have to stop the last turbine this evening, shutting the plant down completely."
Grave consequences
"Such a stop in production will have grave consequences for hospitals and water cleaning stations," he said.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) warned that a shutdown of the station, which provides power to Gaza City, would have "a devastating impact on the lives of women, children and civilians generally in Gaza".
"Depriving people of such basics as water is tantamount to depriving them of human dignity," UNRWA spokesperson Christopher Gunness said. "It is difficult to understand the logic of making hundreds of thousands of people suffer quite needlessly."
With residents having flocked to stock up fuel supplies after the closure was announced late on Thursday, many of the petrol stations were empty on Sunday.
At a station in the Zeitun neighbourhood on the edge of Gaza City, a handful of taxi-drivers milled around, yelling "there's no fuel" to the occasional car which pulled up.
Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak ordered the crossings into Gaza closed late on Thursday, saying the move was aimed at pressuring militants inside to stop firing rockets and mortars into Israel and that it would be reassessed.
The violence between the army and Gaza militants sharply escalated since Tuesday, when an Israeli operation killed 19 Palestinians, mostly gunmen, in the deadliest single day in Gaza in more than a year.
Since then, Israeli raids have killed 36 people, most of them militants, and gunmen have launched some 200 rockets and mortars into Israel, lightly wounding at least 10 people.
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