Media coverage
der Freitag / The Guardian · 2010-07-05
The piece describes how Israel’s blockade and shifting restrictions have turned daily life in Gaza into a constant struggle for food and income, despite goods being visible in markets and despite Israeli claims that there is no humanitarian crisis. It highlights widespread dependence on food aid, the collapse of the formal economy, the rise of tunnel-based trade, and the broader psychological and institutional damage caused by isolation and shortages.
The piece describes how Israel’s blockade and shifting restrictions have turned daily life in Gaza into a constant struggle for food and income, despite goods being visible in markets and despite Israeli claims that there is no humanitarian crisis. It highlights widespread dependence on food aid, t…
It is Friday, the Muslims’ holiday, and the Sharif family is looking forward to the highlight of the week: chicken for lunch. In their bare kitchen in the overcrowded Beach refugee camp, 45-year-old Amal Sharif bends over a steaming pan of maftoul, braised chicken with couscous. The younger of his ten children keep running expectantly into the kitchen. A large chicken like this costs 60 shekels (the equivalent of 13 euros) and is a delicacy the Sharifs can afford only once a week. On the other days, the family lives exclusively on flour, rice, oil, and foodstuffs they can afford thanks to small financial subsidies from the local UN mission. Fruit is considered an unaffordable luxury. The family has not eaten beef for a year.
For 18 years, Amal, as head of the household, was able to provide for his family himself. He was an employee of an Israeli shipping company. But in 2000, when Israel sealed off the Gaza Strip with fences, walls, and checkpoints during the second Intifada, that came to an end. After that he worked as a fisherman. This livelihood, too, disappeared after his boat was destroyed during the three-week Gaza war at the beginning of 2009. With one hand Amal Sharif clutches a prayer bead string, with the other a cigarette: “My income has fallen by 100 percent. If you have no money, then everything is too expensive.”
After easing the blockade, the Israeli authorities declare that there neither was nor is a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. But for heads of households like Amal Sharif, it is a daily struggle and challenge to put enough food on the table. Since the attack on the Gaza aid flotilla at the end of May, the Israelis have repeatedly stressed that it is unnecessary to try to supply the sealed-off territory with aid goods by this route. What is piled high in the markets—fruit, vegetables, nuts, sweets, even slaughtered rabbits—is unaffordable for most people in Gaza City or Rafah. It obscures the complexity of the picture, in which one can make out poverty, a shadow economy, depression, and the growing anger of a population forced to submit to Israeli control over its daily life.
What is allowed into Gaza and what is allowed out changes constantly according to inexplicable and unpredictable criteria. For the inhabitants, it is hard to understand why coriander must stay out and cinnamon may enter, why children’s toys and car spare parts are taboo, and construction materials even more so.
## Ground to Pieces by Shells
“Two weeks ago, coffee beans were banned,” says Raed Fatouh, who is responsible for coordination with the Israelis at the border crossings. “I called, and they explained to me that they could no longer allow beans, only ground coffee.” The justification was that the beans had to be ground, and that in turn could be classified as an “industrial process.” “Butter is the same. If it comes as a 20-kilo slab, then it is forbidden because it has to be cut. Small packets of butter, by contrast, are allowed. Everything that could provide work for a small business is forbidden.”
Eight out of ten residents of the Gaza Strip depend on food aid—at the UN distribution centers in Gaza City, substantially more was handed out at the end of May than was sold in grocery stores. In front of one such United Nations supply depot, 22-year-old Dina Aldan waits with other women in black jilbabs, clutching her food cards and her five-month-old baby. Through a hatch, a transparent plastic bag is tossed to her for her family of five: two bottles of cooking oil, three kilos of sugar, three kilos of rice, a bag of milk, and a tin of cured lamb. Dina Aldan is too weak to carry the 30-kilo sack of flour to which she would be entitled. “I receive this ration every three months, but it lasts only a week,” she says. “If I want other food, I have to go to the market, but there everything is expensive and the quality is poor. Many things are not available at all.” Her husband, a glazier, can now work on average only one day out of ten. The family’s house was ground to pieces by shells during the Gaza war a year and a half ago. The current rent for the new dwelling is bleeding the family dry.
Like many others, Dina Aldan faces the question of whether to drag her aid goods home or sell them to the traders waiting in front of the distribution point. The UN aid workers say they do not monitor what recipients do with the aid goods. After all, one can see that the poor are unable to meet a whole range of needs. “The creeping death of the economy in the Gaza Strip means that some among the poorest have been thrown back onto a medieval barter system and can no longer get hold of any money at all,” says Chris Gunness, spokesperson for the UN mission in Gaza.
In place of the once functioning legal economy, the illegal import of goods has taken over, trickling in through tunnels from Egypt. This parallel market is believed to employ around 20,000 people and, at first glance, appears to meet some of the population’s needs quite well. The Israeli government points out that shops in the Gaza Strip offer a large selection of products. Customers and shopkeepers tell a very different story. In a well-stocked grocery store in Gaza City, 62-year-old Abu Hassan pores over his accounts. The shop has been family-owned for 50 years, but business has never been so bad. “How many customers have entered my shop since you have been here?” he asks. “Not a single one!” The tunnel goods are very expensive, and the quality is often poor. He points to a packet of Egyptian biscuits that has crumbled inside the packaging. Abu Hassan had to throw out the entire shipment. He cannot expect compensation from the traders. “I have to accept it and continue paying in advance.”
Not far from Hassan’s shop, 42-year-old Walid Naim points to the HDTV sets, mixers, microwave ovens, washing machines, freezers, clothes irons, sewing machines, and vacuum cleaners piled up in the shop run by his family. “Everything comes from dark worlds,” he says, as a tiny porcelain cup of Arabic coffee sits before him. “We used to earn well, but now people no longer have the money to shop.” The frequent power cuts in Gaza City are not exactly helpful. “Why would anyone buy electrical appliances if they cannot use them?” Walid shrugs. “The world does not understand the Gaza crisis,” his younger brother Wissam shouts over the noise of the generators that form part of the city’s soundtrack. “The whole world is punishing us.”
## Gaza is not Darfur
In the wake of the uproar over the attack on the aid flotilla, one repeatedly heard the suggestion that Israel could simply ease the blockade and allow more convoys carrying food into Gaza. But closure and isolation are not just a few sacks of flour and a few bottles of cooking oil, important as those may be. According to the UN, the health system is in a desolate state, and the lack of medical equipment has reached a critical point. The UN has been unable to rebuild the schools destroyed in the 2009 Gaza war and to erect enough new buildings for an explosively growing population.
The consequences of a life under lock and key are not only material; psychologically as well, the inhabitants feel isolated. “We are mentally in a state of siege—we are cut off from the rest of the world,” says the economist Omar Shaban. Experts and aid organizations contradict the Israeli assessment that there is no longer a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. On the contrary. “People like to imagine Gaza as Darfur,” Shaban explains. “But this is something entirely different. It is not about the fear of starving to death, but the number of those who can no longer afford many food items is increasing. That is what a humanitarian crisis looks like.” Chris Gunness shares this assessment on behalf of the United Nations. “The crisis in Gaza cannot be compared with the crisis in the southern Sahara. The condition of this territory has political causes. And those have grave humanitarian effects.”
Harriet Sherwood writes for The Guardian on the Middle East. Translation: Christine Käppeler
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Text © der Freitag / The Guardian — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source