GAZA CITY, 22 August 2007 — European donors yesterday promised relief for Gazans who sweltered in dark, airless homes and choked on generator smoke during five days of power outages.
The European Union suspended fuel deliveries to a major Gaza power plant after it began to suspect the Strip’s Hamas rulers were pocketing electricity revenues. Yesterday, it announced that fuel shipments to the power plant would resume today, but that the plant must be audited.
Hamas denied skimming money, saying the allegations were cooked up by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ rival government in the West Bank in an effort to discredit it.
The fuel cutoff confronted Hamas with a major crisis just two months after it seized control of the Strip, vanquishing Fatah forces loyal to Abbas. It also left at least half of Gaza’s 1.4 million residents in the dark and without fans as temperatures soared to 34 Celsius.
Without enough power to keep pumps going, authorities began rationing water. Shops in Gaza City’s main market set up noisy, smoke-spewing generators in the streets to run their lights. Families ran to the grocery stores every few hours to buy food because they could not refrigerate. And streets were jammed with cars and irritable motorists because traffic lights were out.
The electricity outage began Friday after Israel closed a fuel crossing with Gaza, citing security threats. Although Israel reopened the crossing on Sunday, the fuel shipments were not renewed because the EU notified the Israeli fuel vendor that it would not pay for them.
Hamas members have been going door to door in Gaza in recent weeks, ordering residents to pay long-overdue electricity bills. While Hamas denies it controls the electricity company, Fatah insisted it does, citing the arrest last month of the Gaza electric company’s executive director.
The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, decided to resume the fuel shipments provisionally “for humanitarian reasons,” but will be carrying out an audit of the power plant immediately, in conjunction with Abbas’ government, the EC said. If the audit discloses that further controls will be needed, they “will be put in place immediately,” de Mauny said. The EU made it clear that “if they find any money transferred from the company to the Hamas government, they will stop supplying Gaza with fuel within hours,” Palestinian Information Minister Riad Malki added.
An aide to Haniyeh, Mohammed Madhoun, welcomed the resumption of fuel deliveries but objected to Abbas government oversight of the power plant.
“A committee for monitoring and scrutinizing is a professional step and welcomed in principle but this has to be done by the EU alone or... in cooperation with the government in Gaza,” Madhoun said.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians yesterday, two of them children. The two children, 10 and 12 years old, members of the same extended family, were killed by troops in northern Gaza, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanin of the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The army said troops targeted two figures spotted near a rocket launcher in an area where a rocket had been fired into Israel earlier.
A third child, 10, was seriously wounded and six other people were lightly hurt, all of them civilians, Hassanin said.
Earlier Tuesday, Israeli troops killed three armed members of Islamic Jihad in southern Gaza. The army said ground forces fired at gunmen who approached the Israel-Gaza order fence with Israel. Islamic Jihad said the three were on a mission against Israel when they were killed.
