In Gaza, Cars Are Cooking With Gas

At least one line of business still seems to be booming in this benighted land, and it does not involve firing rockets.

It involves tinkering with cars.

"We are under siege," says Ali Awad, 48, an automobile mechanic who is especially adept at a certain procedure ideally suited to the strapped circumstances that nowadays prevail in the Gaza Strip, where punitive sanctions imposed by Israel have crippled an already stumbling economy.

"We have to survive. We cannot just go out and steal."

Instead, Awad and tradespeople like him are performing a kind of modern-day alchemy, somehow keeping cars on the road in a territory where just about every gasoline station has been closed for weeks, owing to an acute and persistent shortage of fuel supplies.

Gasoline for automobiles has been especially hard hit, and not by accident.

"As far as I'm concerned, the residents of Gaza can walk," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said last month, "and they will not get gasoline because they have a murderous, terrorist regime that does not allow the residents of southern Israel to live in peace."

Olmert was referring to Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and condones the almost daily firing of mortars and improvised rockets, known as Qassams, toward Israel. For that reason, and also because Hamas refuses to formally recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state, Israel imposes a severe economic blockade on the territory, limiting the entry of most goods and sharply restricting the supply of fuel, especially gas for automobiles.

As a result, almost all of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants should probably have blisters on their feet by now from so much walking.

But they have been at least partly spared that particular hardship, thanks in no small measure to mechanics like Awad, men who have mastered the trick of converting cars to run on a pressurized and flammable concoction that still manages to find its way into Gaza, albeit in diminished quantities.

It is called cooking gas.

For 1,000 shekels – about $275 – Awad can convert an automobile to operate on a combustible source of energy better known for its role in the preparation of dinner. He does an average of one conversion a day.

The job takes about eight hours to complete and involves running a fuel line from the trunk or back seat to the engine, where a specially designed pump is installed near the radiator. When the job is done, the vehicle's operator can choose to burn conventional gasoline or the cooking stuff by flicking a switch on the dashboard.

"For me, as a mechanic, it's easy," says the grizzled owner of Our Carburetor Shop, a concrete-block structure with a corrugated zinc roof tucked amid an array of similar enterprises on Salahadin Road.

"Older cars are easier to convert. Newer ones are really difficult."

Fortunately for Awad, the automobiles that ply Gaza's dusty, rutted boulevards, weaving in and out among the donkey carts and sway-backed horses, tend to be machines of a certain age.

Despite Awad's best efforts, there has been a noticeable reduction in the volume of automobile traffic in Gaza in recent weeks, especially now that local fuel distributors are on strike – a paradoxical protest against the Israeli-imposed shortages. But the territory's streets are nonetheless surprisingly busy when you consider the almost complete absence of gasoline here.

Apart from trucks and taxis, which mostly run on diesel fuel – still sporadically available – it's probably a safe bet that most of the cars still seeing action in the gas wars of Gaza have a canister of cooking gas hooked up in the back seat or trunk.

The conversion of cars to run on cooking gas is by no means unique to Gaza. It is popular in India and many other countries because it offers improved fuel economy and a cleaner-burning engine.

The difference in Gaza is that, here, the procedure is being used to help circumvent a hostile blockade.

In other words, it's tantamount to an act of war, albeit a peaceful one.

This is the way Awad looks at it.

"You can steal," he says, "or you can work with honour."

And drive with cooking gas.