Tuesday January 22, 2008
When
it opened its doors seven years ago, the European Gaza hospital was one
of the biggest foreign investments in the long-troubled Gaza Strip and
one of the leading medical centres in the Palestinian territories.
Yesterday, the 250-bed hospital was sliding rapidly into crisis,
turning away patients for routine operations and struggling to manage
emergency cases, as the sole power plant in Gaza halted electricity
production after Israel stopped all fuel supplies.

Israel
said its closure of the Gaza strip was intended to halt the firing of
makeshift rockets by Palestinian militants into southern Israel.

Yet
Israel’s stark new policy has meant no fuel or food aid has come into
Gaza since last Thursday. Large parts of the overcrowded strip had no
power, leaving it without lights and heating, closing bakeries and
forcing hospitals to rely on generators and their own limited fuel
reserves. As night fell nearly all Gaza City was in darkness. Simply
put, it was “collective punishment,” said the European commissioner for
external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

Osama
Nahal, a paediatric doctor in the European hospital’s special care baby
unit, looked resigned. “Politics is politics, but the care of human
beings must be away from politics,” he said. His unit now has 10
newly-born patients, of whom two are on ventilators.

The
hospital in Khan Yunis, which was built with European and UN funding,
takes most of its electricity from the power plant, so it was largely
without any yesterday. The hospital’s own fuel reserves, normally
120,000 litres, are down to 10,000 litres following Israel’s economic
boycott of Gaza over the past two years.

The
UN sent emergency fuel supplies from its depot inside Gaza. It was
enough to power the hospital’s smallest generator and to provide
electricity for the intensive care units and emergency operations. But
when those last reserves run dry, the power will stop. “If new supplies
don’t come, we’ll have to put the patients on manual ventilation. All
of us will have to work at it non-stop, 24-hours a day,” said Nahal.

“It’s
a very serious situation. If it continues, we will stop being able to
give our service,” said Mohammad Abu Shahla, the hospital director. “Do
you think we have anywhere else to move the patients? There is nowhere.”

Even
with Gaza’s power plant, which supplies around a quarter of the strip’s
electricity, closed, Israel yesterday at first appeared intent on
holding to its closure policy. “As far as I’m concerned, all the
residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because
they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn’t allow people in the
south of Israel to live in peace,” said the Israeli prime minister,
Ehud Olmert.

Last
night, however, the defence minister, Ehud Barak, decided to allow
one-off shipments of diesel and medicine into Gaza beginning today.

“We
think Hamas got the message,” said Arye Mekel, a foreign ministry
spokesman. “When they want to stop the rockets they can.” It was not
clear how much fuel would be allowed in, or how regular the shipments
would be.

The
case of the increasingly desperate humanitarian crisis in the Gaza
Strip has been often told and often ignored in the two years since the
Islamist movement Hamas won the Palestinian elections and then seized
full control of Gaza last summer. But never before have the warnings of
the fragility of the strip’s 1.5 million people been so stark.

Yesterday,
the UN Relief and Works Agency, which works with Palestinian refugees
and provides crucial food aid to 870,000 Gazans, warned that it would
have to stop distributing its food support by tomorrow or Thursday
because it could not import the bags or the fuel to deliver the food.

Israeli officials have said they believe officials in Gaza had shut down the power plant unnecessarily.

However,
John Ging, the director of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza, said the crisis
was acutely real. “The representative of the government of Israel
making such a statement is obviously misinformed about the reality
here,” he said. “It is a matter of fact that the power plant has run
out of fuel. The government of Israel knows very well to the last litre
what comes into Gaza. They control everything.”

Ging
said the rocket fire from Gaza, though illegal, did not justify such
punitive measures against the civilian population, and the Israeli
civilian population hit by the rockets, notably in Sderot near the
boundary with Gaza, also deserved protection.

“Firing
rockets from Gaza is not supported by the population here,” he said.
“One’s actions must be measured against the rule of law. We should look
at each action and hold accountable those who are actually committing
them.”

Israeli
military incursions and air strikes have killed nearly 40 Palestinians
in Gaza in the past week, at least 10 of them civilians. Palestinian
militants shot dead an Ecuadorian kibbutz volunteer last week and fired
more than a 160 rockets into southern Israel, although the number fell
after the closure.

As
night fell yesterday a crowd of shoppers crammed into Samir Khadr’s
bakery in Gaza City, one of the few shops with the luxury of its own
generator. Khadr had enough fuel to last just one more day. “Israel is
the one responsible for this. We’re more fed up with the rockets than
they are,” he said. “We have no electricity, no fuel, no cooking gas,
just candles. It’s going to be miserable.”

Backstory:

Gaza has only one power plant, supplying around a quarter of the electricity used by the strip’s 1.5 million people. The rest is bought mostly from Israel, and from Egypt. When Israel imposed a full closure on Gaza’s crossings on Friday, all fuel supplies to the power plant were stopped. On Sunday evening the plant halted production. Both of its 10,000-cubic-metre storage tanks
are now empty. Even before the latest closure, Israel was limiting fuel
supplies, which kept production down to around 55 megawatts, a long way
short of the 140MW that the plant was built to produce.