The Israeli Defence Ministry's programme to punish all Gazans for Qassam missiles fire into Israeli territory is apparently moving into a new phase. A second round of fuel cuts reportedly started on 30 December, with a military-ordered reduction of some 35-43 per cent (depending on what numbers are used as the baseline) in the amount of gasoline that will now be supplied to the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli human rights organisation GISHA has brought together a group of Israeli and Palestinian human rights bodies who have petitioned the Israeli High Supreme Court to block the military-ordered cuts in fuel and electricity to Gaza, and to revoke the 19 September Israeli cabinet decision that is the basis of these cuts -- the declaration that the Gaza Strip is a hostile entity or enemy territory. The petitioners argued that this is not purely and simply an economic boycott.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said recently that his country was engaged in a true war with Gaza which is being waged with one eye constantly on the reaction of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is trying to shepherd the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority into a peace agreement that will include the creation of a Palestinian state, if possible before George Bush leaves office in January 2009.

At the heart of the human rights group's petition to the court is the argument still resisted by many within Israel, widely accepted everywhere else in the world, though not explicitly enunciated in the documentation presented to the court, that Israel continues to be in occupation of the Gaza Strip from which it carried out a unilateral disengagement in the late summer of 2005, removing some 8,000 Israeli settlers and the Israeli army protecting them.

Israel controls all external access to Gaza, but wants to keep Gaza's population of nearly 1.5 million Palestinians (at least one-third of whom are refugees from what is now Israel) at arms length.

Israel continues to maintain total control over Gaza's air and maritime space, the litmus test in international law to determine whether or not Israel's occupation continues, regardless of protests and denial. Israel also meets the additional test of exercising effective control of the Gaza Strip -- the Israeli army go in and out at will, and operate largely as they wish.

Israeli surveillance drones are constantly buzzing overhead, and a large white surveillance blimp is tethered just over the Erez, crossing from Israel into northern Gaza, and others may be placed elsewhere around the Gaza Strip. This is in addition to all the usual electronic and satellite monitoring. Israel insists it should have the right, for its own security, to decide about all human entry and exit from Gaza, and was very unsettled by Egypt's recent unilateral decision to permit the passage of pilgrims through Rafah to perform the Hajj.

Israel makes all the decisions about which goods can officially pass into or out of the Gaza Strip. Only ten essential supplies are now permitted: cooking oil, salt, rice, sugar, wheat, dairy products, frozen vegetables, frozen meat, medical equipment and medicine. It is an unprecedented regime of control and neglect with no apparent mechanism of appeal.

So far, the Israeli High Supreme Court has declined to intervene in the military's decision to order the first phase of fuel cuts that started on 28 October. A private Israeli company, Dor Alon, which enjoys an Israeli-awarded monopoly on fuel sales to the Gaza Strip -- their sales to the Palestinian Authority account for some 40 per cent of their business -- apparently experienced no qualms in complying immediately with the instructions.

Phase I cuts were supposed to reduce by 15 per cent the amount of fuel supplied to Gaza in the month of October. But the actual quantities of fuel supplied were not cut evenly across the board, the human rights groups and various monitoring organisations say. The fuel deliveries are made weekly, and figures from the receiving bodies indicate that industrial diesel used to run the main Gaza Power Plant was reportedly reduced by 12-15 per cent, while gasoline used for automobiles was reduced by 40 per cent.

The court has not yet responded to the human rights group's recent repeated requests for a restraining order to block Phase II fuel cuts. The measures now proposed by the Israeli Defence Ministry apparently include a temporary restoration to pre-cut levels of the amounts of diesel fuel that will be allowed into Gaza. GISHA's Executive Director Sari Bashi noted that hospitals have been significantly impaired for lack of diesel, and tens of thousands of Gazans are being deprived of clean water on a rotating basis. Diesel is used to operate generators, which are vitally-needed back-up sources of power during rolling and random power outages in Gaza. Some hospital systems, including the laundry and sanitation services at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, run on diesel. Some automobiles and other vehicles also use diesel fuel.

Bashi, a lawyer, said that the state -- which told the court that it limits the humanitarian impact as much as possible -- does modify its reduction of vital supplies to Gaza when the damage gets bad enough. But, Bashi says, the cuts themselves are completely illegal, and endanger 1.5 million people who are being pushed to the brink of death. GISHA and its co- petitioners argued that any reduction in electricity supply to Gaza would inevitably damage the operation of hospitals, water systems, and other vital services.

The electricity cuts that were to go into effect on 2 December have been delayed pending further clarification. On 30 November, the Israeli High Court asked the government for more information on the impact of proposed electricity cuts, and said it assumed the military would accordingly delay its planned cuts. According to Bashi, the army indicated in early November that it was already installing voltage-reduction dimmers on four of the 10 feeder lines through which the Israel Electric Company, a semi-public utility, supplies electricity to various parts of the Gaza Strip. The military's plan was to reduce electrical supply by five per cent on one of these lines per week, until all four lines were regularly operating at the lower capacity.

But, Bashi said, in information it supplied to the court on 18 December, the state revealed that it accidentally reduced the electrical supplies to Gaza by five per cent on two lines for a period of 13 days. The Israeli High Supreme Court said it was "astonished", demanded more specific clarification from the state, and scheduled a hearing in late January, showing its true extent of its concern.

Electricity and fuel are actually closely interconnected. Israel now supplies some 140 MW of electricity directly to Gaza. Gaza's main power plant which is designed to be able to generate 140 MW of electricity can now provide only 55-60 MW per day. It depends on diesel fuel imported from Israel, which is being paid for by the European Union.

Rafiq Maliha, Deputy Director of the Gaza Power and Electricity Company, said that there are two problems at the Gaza power plant, and the main one is lack of fuel. "We are receiving fuel, but not the proper amount. We are already experiencing reductions, and we are eating up our reserves. The other problem is that the June 2006 Israeli air attack on the Gaza power plant destroyed, one by one, all six transformers at the power station. We now have a temporary configuration which is only partially working. We have not been able to restore the plant's capacity and now we are only able to produce a maximum of 60 MW of electricity rather than the 140 MW that the plant was designed to generate. Since the attack, we have been running in a constant state of electricity deficit."

At present, Gaza needs 240 MW of electricity a day but is getting only some 80 per cent of that amount from three sources: the Israel Electric Company is currently supplying some 120 MW; Egypt is providing 17 MW across the border to the Rafah district in Gaza; and the main Gaza Power Plant is generating some 55-60 MW. The 20 per cent deficit is being managed by burden-sharing, which distributes the planned cuts through rolling black-outs and brown-outs. But, in the current situation this is a fragile compromise.

The deficit could have been reduced with the recent delivery of a new transformer, Maliha said, which would add 25-30 MW of production per day, so that Gaza power plant could now provide up to 80 MW of electricity. But, to do that would require receiving 500 cubic metres of diesel fuel per day, and that is double the amount presently supplied under Phase I cuts. Due to lack of fuel, Maliha explained, "we are running only two gas turbine units out of four."

The numbers are chilling: each unit needs 160 cubic metres per day of liquid fuel to operate (or 720 cubic metres per day for all four) and each unit will generate 25-30 MW of electricity, he explained. "Until early November, we were receiving 360 cubic metres a day, and running two turbines. But what we are now receiving is only 250 cubic metres of fuel a day which is not enough to run even two. So, we have been dipping into our reserves which were 2000 cubic metres to make up the difference. And, by the first days in January, we will have zero reserves left."

Unless there is a change, when the reserves are exhausted, Gazans will be receiving only enough incoming fuel to run one turbine per day with the present cuts, and the main power plant will have to cut back its output by 25-30 MW of electricity per day. "Gaza's present daily electricity deficit will almost double." In addition to the calculations concerning the turbines, any power they generate requires step-up and step-down transformers to distribute the electricity in Gaza. A new transformer has just been delivered to Gaza, so "we can run a new turbine. But to do that we also need more fuel."

In an affidavit submitted with GISHA's petition to the Israeli High Supreme Court, Nedal Toman, engineer and project manager for the Gaza Electricity and Distribution Company (GEDCO) stated, "the electrical system in Gaza is radial, and not a ring system. There is no interconnected grid. That means that it is not possible to stop electricity supplies to a sub-line feed. There is no technical way to be able to supply electricity in lower voltage [amounts] through the main line; you either supply electricity, or you do not. We can only cut the electricity to the main line."

Israel bans the entry of all spare parts into Gaza including those needed for essential support systems such as water and sewage pumps, electrical installations, and back-up generators, which threatens to throw the entire precarious situation into chaos at any moment.

Maher Najjar of the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility said in a phone conversation on 16 December that the second of Gaza's three big stand-by generators had just failed, and they have no spare parts to fix it. "This was a minor catastrophe that could quickly become a major one if there is any loss of electricity, because this stand-by generator has been used to maintain operations in one of Gaza City's major sewage pumping stations. And, there are now constant power reductions and outages in Gaza."

As an immediate emergency measure, Najjar said, "we have asked GEDCO not to cut power at all to this sewage pumping station. But if anything happens -- for example, if demand suddenly exceeds capacity -- then the system will fail and Gaza City's Zeitoun district will be flooded with sewage. We have three containers of spare parts sitting in Ramallah. But we have not received any spare parts for nearly six months. Many letters have been sent to the Israeli authorities about this urgency of this problem without any response."

The Coastal Waters Municipalities Water Utility has been working with the World Bank, and hopes that institution may weigh in soon. Last week, Najjar reported that one of the two broken big back-up generators was being cannibalised for spare parts to fix the other one at Pump Station 7, which was a top priority. "If there is no generator at the pumping station, there will be a sewage flood. So we divert our resources to the pumping station, and even if that means that the waste water will be only partially treated, it is something. Even without an immediate crisis, we have 35 projects that are stopped or frozen because we cannot repair any assets. For the present infrastructure, if you don't have preventive maintenance, then you have breakdowns. It's a matter of a potential catastrophe, and the whole water and sewage system is at risk if the situation doesn't change."