Media coverage
Deutsche Welle (Greek) · 2013-08-26
DW Greek on Gaza’s isolation after the fall of Mohamed Morsi. The Palestinian political scientist Omar Shaban calls Morsi’s fall “a sort of political tsunami for Hamas”, after a year of Islamist support in which everything suddenly changed.
The border crossing at Rafah is the only outlet for the residents of the Gaza Strip to the rest of the world. Every time something happens, the Egyptian authorities close it for a few hours, with the result that Palestinians are unable to travel from Cairo airport to other countries.
Cut off from the world
Thus Nabil Surafa, a travel agent, is forced to go to Gaza City and cancel tickets. In recent years the situation has become more difficult for his family business, which operates in an area where the majority of the 1.7 million inhabitants cannot move freely. Exit to Egypt through Rafah has been an ordeal in recent months, and even before the fall of the Morsi government, but at least the procedures had somewhat eased. Now passengers look back on that period nostalgically.
Many travelers wait endless hours, while others come to try their luck. “On September 1 I have important exams at the University of Algeria and my visa expires on September 3,” says the student Igad Abu Zanouma. “For a week now I have been coming and going in the hope of finding a chance to leave. Gaza is not the only area that has a border crossing with Egypt, but this one here is constantly closed. We are human beings, not animals.”
Many others who live and work abroad share the same fate. The situation is constantly worsening, and Hamas is too preoccupied with internal matters in the Gaza Strip to take action.
A hardening of Hamas’s stance
“The fall of Morsi was something like a political tsunami for Hamas,” argues the Palestinian political scientist Omar Shaban. “For one year they had the support of the Islamists in every form, political and economic. But suddenly everything changed.” While other allies of Egypt in the region had drifted away, the Islamist government of Hamas found ideological support in the Morsi government. Morsi’s ouster forced the Palestinian Islamists to change their stance. Observers believe that in the future Hamas will pursue a tougher policy in order to control the residents of the tiny strip. Nervousness already prevails in the security units. A short while ago they closed the offices of two independent media outlets. The accusation was that through their reporting they were inciting the public against Hamas.
For all this situation, the Hamas leadership presents a mild face outwardly and expresses itself in a highly diplomatic and diversionary manner. “The Egyptians are very busy with themselves,” says Ihab al-Ghussein, a Hamas spokesman. “But we hope that stability will soon return and that they will once again be able to deal with the Palestinian cause.”
The situation is particularly difficult for residents in the southern part of Gaza. The Egyptian army has blown up many of the underground tunnels that connected the strip with Sinai, and thus vital corridors of communication for the survival of the Palestinians were destroyed, even if they were also used for the transport of weapons. No one knows what is going to happen in the future. Uncertainty is a permanent “companion” of the Palestinians, and even more so at this time.
Tania Krämer / Eirini Anastasopoulou
Editor in charge: Kostas Symeonidis
Text © Deutsche Welle (Greek) — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source