Hamas, Israel ease blockade

AMMAN — The Palestinian Hamas movement is denouncing as traitors militants who fire rockets at Israel - an apparent acknowledgment that the punishment inflicted by Israel on Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians has been too severe since Hamas seized control of the strip in June 2007.

Israel on Tuesday closed the Nahal Oz crossing, the transit point for fuel into Gaza, and the Sufa passage for food deliveries, a day after a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip slammed into an empty field outside the southern Israeli town of Sderot, causing no casualties or damage.

Prominent Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar described the militants who fired the rocket as “those who collaborate with Israel, because there is a consensus by all Palestinian factions to respect the truce.”

The Israeli army says 40 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza since Egypt mediated a truce agreement seven weeks ago. Hamas insists it is respecting the cease-fire and has vowed to crack down on smaller militant groups that continue to shoot at Israel.

Mr. Zahar told a Gaza radio station the party that fired the rocket was “linked to Israel as they provide a pretext to exercise pressure on the Palestinian people.”

Palestinians are still waiting to see whether the truce will result in an ease of Israel’s blockade, which has plunged the narrow and densely populated Mediterranean strip into yet more poverty.

Israel says it has kept its crossings into the virtual prison open to basic humanitarian supplies since declaring the Gaza Strip a “hostile entity,” from where Palestinian militants have regularly fired homemade rockets into bordering Israeli communities.

But it has not specified what these humanitarian items entail, and Palestinians complain the Israelis have been using the transport of basic supplies and fuel to tighten the noose around Gaza under the pretext of militant rocket fire and security.

The result has been a paralysis of the economy.

Aid agencies say that Gazans have had to depend on less than one-fifth of the volume of imported supplies they received in December 2005 - the month before Palestinians voted overwhelmingly in favor of Hamas in legislative elections.

The vote provoked the start of Israeli sanctions in an attempt to isolate the Islamist group, a move that received support by some Western countries but was viewed by most Palestinians as punishment for electing Hamas.

With no exports permitted out of Gaza, minimum imports entering and a total ban on what used to be cheap labor to Israel, at least 37 percent of breadwinners became unemployed. Each of them has 8.6 dependents, according to the United Nations.

In January, aid agencies once again sounded the alarm, this time warning that the strip was suffering its worst humanitarian crisis since the Israeli occupation in 1967. The United Nations also stated that the Palestinian economy has suffered “irreversible damage.”

The desperation was evident when Palestinians breached the sealed Rafah border crossing with Egypt and more than half of Gaza’s population flooded into nearby Egyptian towns to stock up on food and groceries that had run out from their shops and homes.

Egypt was accused of colluding with Israel in “starving” the people when it closed its Rafah border after Hamas forced out the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which had co-managed the crossing with Egypt along with EU monitors. The passage is now controlled by Egypt and Hamas, which randomly allow special and medical cases to pass through.

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