Media coverage
Al-Ray Palestinian Media Agency · 2014-08-18
A report, written during the Cairo ceasefire talks of summer 2014, on young Gazans' hopes for a seaport. Shaban says building and operating a port would create 50,000 jobs, transform the Palestinian economy and bind the governorates together economically, and that it matters even more to the West Bank, which depends on Israeli ports with their restrictions and costs.
A report, written during the Cairo ceasefire talks of summer 2014, on young Gazans' hopes for a seaport. Shaban says building and operating a port would create 50,000 jobs, transform the Palestinian economy and bind the governorates together economically, and that it matters even more to the West B…
## Gaza Youth’s Dreams Turn Toward the Seaport... Will It Be Realized?!
18 October / August 2014 01:22
Gaza – Al-Rai – Maisara Shaaban
There is no doubt that Palestinian youth are the group most aspiring to the idea of a seaport, and they are the largest group in a society suffering crises on different levels (political, economic, and even living conditions) that know no proper path toward the future, even in the most modest of dreams.
Many young people have pinned their hopes on establishing a seaport on the coast of the Gaza Strip. The young man Fadl Ayyash turns his dreams into a joke, saying to his friends: “After the war, we have to take a trip to Gaza International Port and board a big ship, and I’m ready to be the captain, just so we can forget the atmosphere of war, nothing more.”
For about two weeks, Egypt has been sponsoring indirect negotiations between the Palestinian and Israeli delegations, with the aim of reaching a ceasefire agreement, as the occupation rejects the Palestinian resistance’s conditions of completely lifting the siege and establishing a seaport.
The Palestinian factions stipulate the establishment of a seaport in the Gaza Strip in order to accept a full truce with Israel and turn the page on the harsh war that broke out on 8 July last year, leaving more than 1,940 martyrs and ten thousand wounded.
Meanwhile, the young man Hossam al-Kilani lays out his dreams before his eyes and says: “My God, if only the seaport project on the coast of Gaza could be realized, and create a new job opportunity for me, and Gaza would flourish with incoming and outgoing goods,” hoping that God will make his dream come true very soon so as to eliminate the scourge of unemployment widespread in the Gaza Strip.
As for the young woman Reham Abu Taweela, she explained that establishing a seaport would rescue the Strip from the clutches of the occupation, its imposition of control over Gaza, and its control over the crossings that are opened only drop by drop. She asked: “We are tired of the siege, poverty, and humiliation, so why does the Gaza Strip not live in freedom, and why is none of the youth’s dreams realized on the ground?”
According to Palestinian economic analysts and observers, the seaport is the only and optimal solution to end the suffering of 1.8 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who are living through humanitarian and economic crises worsening to an unprecedented degree because of the Israeli blockade imposed for the eighth consecutive year.
The economic expert Dr. Omar Shaban stated that building and operating a port in Gaza would create 50,000 job opportunities, would bring about a leap in the Palestinian economy, would work to consolidate the economic relationship between all the governorates of Palestine in the north and south, and would bring about enormous development in work and industrial skills in Palestine, enhance technical and knowledge-based interaction between Palestinian society and the world, and would constitute one of the landmarks of urbanity and civilization.
Dr. Shaban explained that Gaza Port is not necessary for the Gaza Strip alone; rather, it is of even greater importance to the governorates of the West Bank, which depend on Israeli ports for export and import, and all that this means in terms of restrictions, security procedures, costs, and additional taxes.
For his part, Moin Rajab, Professor of Economics at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, described the seaport project as a realistic and practical idea for ending the siege on the Gaza Strip completely.
Rajab said: “What the resistance is adopting is a humanitarian condition that Israel must accept, and all countries must support moving toward its realization. Gaza’s commercial crossings have been closed and destroyed throughout the past years, and there is suffering that is worsening day after day. Europe can be a mediator and monitor for the operation of the corridor, and remove Israeli fears.”
Rajab affirmed that the idea of the port is the easiest of the ideas and the closest to becoming a reality compared with other economic ideas such as rebuilding Gaza Airport and rehabilitating the Strip’s commercial crossings.
For his part, Dr. Jamal al-Khudari, the independent deputy in the Palestinian Legislative Council and head of the Popular Committee Against the Siege, believed that operating and rehabilitating Gaza Seaport would work to end the siege on Gaza in all its forms, noting that it is a right for all Palestinians. He explained that many Arab, Islamic, and European countries had undertaken to support this project and bring it to light as soon as possible if Israeli approval were granted.
The Israeli government rejects the establishment of a seaport in Gaza for several reasons, including, as Reserve Major General Eliezer (Chiney) Marom, former commander of the navy, said in an article in the Hebrew newspaper Maariv, that establishing a port in Gaza would lead to a serious blow to Israeli national security, on the pretext of smuggling goods and means of combat on an unprecedented scale, and that “the Authority in the West Bank would then like to demand a single free crossing to Jordan that would not be under supervision, and an airport that it would operate?”
It is worth noting that Israel has closed all four commercial crossings since 2007 following Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, and has relied on the Kerem Abu Salem crossing for goods in the southeast of the Strip and Beit Hanoun “Erez” in the north of the Strip for patients and travelers, which it controls and closes whenever it wishes under security pretexts as punishment for the Palestinians. Egyptian authorities also close the Rafah crossing from time to time and open it only for humanitarian cases to travel.
Text © Al-Ray Palestinian Media Agency — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source