According to an ordinary piece of news, the Egyptian Supply Control members seized a truck loaded with 100 small power generators at a security checkpoint at the entrance of Al-Arish City. These were being smuggled into the Gaza Strip, so the load was confiscated and the person accompanying the driver arrested.
The Egyptian employees did their job according to the law when they confiscated the equipment, since the carrier does not hold a permission to export, nor did he pay taxes for that. Perhaps, he does not even hold any official documents proving neither that the generators were bought nor their destination. But the issue here does not only pertain to implementing the law. It has a much broader dimension, which is the humanitarian aspect of the use [of the generators], regardless if the owner of the generators is only smuggling them to make profit, taking advantage of the acute shortage of energy suffered by the people in Gaza.
This is not an attempt to hold Egypt responsible for the blockade imposed on the strip. Israel is first and foremost responsible for the tragedy taking place there in all its dimensions, as it has prevented supplying the strip with sufficient fuel to run the only power plant there. The hundred or even thousand generators will not solve the crisis, knowing that the Egyptian authorities turn a blind eye on many similar smuggling operations. It also allows transferring medical and humanitarian aid whenever it is conducted using legal ways and in coordination with it.
The policy of targeting the civilians is an Israeli principle adopted since the establishment of the state in 1948. It was implemented by the occupation army extensively when it besieged Beirut, under the pretext of driving the PLO fighters out. It did not distinguish between those fighters, the Palestinian and Lebanese civilians when it savagely bombarded civilian neighborhood or when it imposed a tight blockade on bread and water, let alone the carnage it perpetrated in Sabra and Shatila Camps, after it invaded the city.
The purpose here is to reveal that the residents in Gaza are paying the price for the confusion between the militants and civilians and the intentional cancellation of the limits between the political and humanitarian. So they have become victims twice; once for Israel’s tyranny, and another for the policies of Hamas.
We might not endorse Hamas’s ideas and positions; we absolutely reject its affiliation to the Iranian interest and refuse that the black spots on the forehead [which appear when worshippers press their foreheads into the ground during prayers] be a criterion for nationalism. Likewise, we refuse that the black ideas behind the same foreheads be the foundations for organizing the Palestinian society in Gaza and outside it. But among the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza, many reject the rule of the extremist movement and its planning for their present and future. They feel that they are paying the price of its intransigence in achieving inter-Palestinian reconciliation, just as they unjustly tolerated the repercussions of its refusal for a peaceful settlement and the ensuing wars. They are also wondering why they are left to face their destiny alone.
The question, which is yet to be answered logically by the Arabs themselves and the world is: Could we continue to overlook the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, because Hamas is wrong and should be held responsible, or because we are unable to confront Israel and force it to lift the siege off the civilians? All the world countries enthusiastically expressed sympathy with the victims of the earthquake in Haiti and donated aid for them, but the victims of the Gaza “earthquake” do not feel that they received the same attention or that will ever receive it.
Front Page Features