IT’S a miserable time to be a Gazan.
EMPTY STREETS Gaza City can feel like a ghost town on a Friday morning, with its factories closed, jobs scarce and gas too expensive for many people to use. SCRIMPING Majid Ajour used to sell pigeons for $3 apiece. With the principal border crossings to Israel and Egypt closed, the price of imported feed has risen. Now he tries to sell his pigeons for nearly $4 each.
Hopes were high in 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and 9,000 Jewish settlers, and the international community lined up to help the Palestinians make Gaza a model for their potential state.
But happy endings are rare in this part of the world. In the last year, life in Gaza has been plagued by criminal gangs as well as fighting among Palestinian groups. Some rocket barrages aimed at Israel fall on Gaza itself, and Israeli retaliation for the rest ranges from military strikes to economic quarantine.
Months of battling between the main political factions, Fatah and Hamas, culminated in a Gazan civil war in June, with 160 people killed and 800 wounded, many of them civilians. Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist group by Israel, the United States and the European Union, was the winner.
The struggle is hardly finished, with Fatah trying to consolidate in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Just last week, a large Fatah demonstration on the third anniversary of Yasir Arafat’s death ended in violence when Hamas police fired into a rock-throwing crowd and killed six people, while beating others.
Hamas is under siege, and with it, the people of Gaza.
It’s not just that Hamas is shunned by the West and Israel, which has declared Gaza “a hostile entity” and is moving to restrict supplies of gasoline, diesel fuel and electricity. Gaza is also shunned by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who is a ready accomplice in the effort to punish and pressure Hamas.
After the Israelis pulled out in 2005, Gazans complained that they lived in a big prison, since Israel still controlled their airspace, sea coasts and principal border crossings. Such claims had an element of propaganda, but now, with the crossing into Egypt for people also shut, by Egypt, the accusation is much closer to reality.
A trickle of the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza can now leave their tiny coastal strip for any reason whatsoever. The streets are ghostly, with little traffic, and the private economy is dying, lacking needed imports and unable to export.
Gaza is a deeply conservative society, but Hamas’s growth has been reflected in the increasing number of women not only covering their hair, but also their faces. Israel says that it will ensure that no one starves in Gaza, and that the essentials of life will be provided.
But Israel also wants to see that Hamas suffers, by making Gazans suffer, to impress on them that the best path lies in accommodation and negotiation with Israel for a Palestinian state. Fatah backs that strategy, not the violent, religious and national struggle against Israel that Hamas advocates and practices.
Raji Sourani, director of Gaza’s Palestinian Center for Human Rights, is himself stuck in Gaza. No friend to Hamas, he has a new metaphor.
“At least in prison, and I’ve been in prison, there are rules,” he said. “But now we live in a kind of animal farm. We live in a pen, and they dump in food and medicine.”
These photographs show today’s diminished Gaza, more isolated and more religious, where people try, as they must, to go on with the everyday epics of ordinary life.
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