Israeli, Egyptian blockades see growth and jobs evaporate
GAZA: Life has never seemed so grim for the Mustafas, a family of seven cramped into a shabby two-room hovel in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp.
Seven years into an Israeli blockade and ten months into a crippling Egyptian one, Gaza’s economic growth has evaporated and unemployment soared to almost 40 per cent by the end of 2013.
Opposition to the Hamas militant group which runs the Gaza Strip has led its neighbours to quarantine the enclave, shutting residents out of the struggling Mideast peace process and leaving them with plenty of parties to blame.
Living on UN handouts of rice, flour, canned meat and sunflower oil, with limited access to proper health care or clean water, families like the Mustafas – seemingly permanent refugees from ancestral lands now part of Israel – have no money, no jobs and no hope.
‘We’re drowning… We feel like the whole world is on top of us. I turn on the television and I see the lifestyles on there, and I think, God help me leave this place,’ said Tareq, 22.
The Mustafas often must pick up and move when rain floods their low-lying home – even on a sunny day, it’s lined with slick, smelly mildew. They stand in the dark, as 12-hour power cuts are now the norm throughout Gaza due to scant fuel.
‘There’s no money for university or to get married. There’s not even enough to spend outside the house so we can escape a little. What kind of life is this?’ Tareq asks.
Well over half of Gaza residents receive food from the United Nations, and the number is on the rise.
UNRWA, the UN Refugee Works Agency devoted to feeding and housing the refugees, told Reuters it was now feeding some 820,000, up by 40,000 in the last year. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) gives food aid to some 180,000 other residents.
More than 1.2 million of 1.8 million Gazans are refugees or their descendants who fled or were driven from land that became part of Israel in the war of its foundation in 1948.
As decades passed, the hand of occupation variously clenched or relaxed through wars and uprisings. Groups of tents slowly morphed into concrete ghettos – eight camps in total – where chances for change feel as narrow as the claustrophobic alleys.
‘Gaza just seems to keep descending further into poverty and de-development of the economy,’ said Scott Anderson, deputy director of operations at UNRWA, noting that the level of aid dependency faced by Gaza has few parallels in the world.
‘In terms of economic shock to a population, probably somewhere like Sierra Leone might be the only place where people experience what the people of Gaza experience on a daily basis,’ he told Reuters.
The crisis is pulling down the Strip’s most vulnerable, not just among its poor but also its sick. While basic health and economic indicators outstrip much of Africa, the rising level of aid dependency and sense of confinement takes a constant toll. (Reuters)