Gazans suffer as Hamas loses focus

Six years after it won support on the Gaza Strip for its focus on the necessities of life, Hamas is pursuing policies ensuring Gazans are cold, wet and hungry.

While the world watches with concern at the 1.6 million residents of the Gaza Strip coping with the combination of once-in-a-century floods and freezing temperatures – further exacerbated by power blackouts – there is a sense of tragic inevitability to this latest level of suffering. The power crisis was not caused by the wintery weather afflicting the region but predated it by a month, caused by the blockade that has been in place for most of the time since Hamas took control of the strip in 2007.

The people of the Gaza Strip are paying the price for Hamas’ misguided policies inside Gaza, and towards other Palestinian factions as well as its neighbouring Egypt. Hamas insists on the use of violence to reach political goals. The party’s ill-fated alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during Mohammed Morsi’s year as president has seen relations sour since the Egyptian army temporarily resumed power. The effect has been to create a stranglehold, slowing the flow of essential goods into the strip through the combination of formal crossing points and the network of illicit tunnels linking it to Egypt. Diesel supplies for Gaza’s only power plant, which ran out early last month, are just one such commodity.

The irony of this parlous situation is that Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in part through the popular support it earned by concentrating on providing the mundane essentials of life. Fatah, by comparison, was seen as riven with cronyism and corruption that distracted it from addressing the day-to-day needs of the residents of what is, in effect, an open prison controlled by Israel. Six years on, Hamas seems to have lost sight of its original appeal to the besieged residents of the Gaza Strip.

Gaza’s power plant rumbled back into life again on Sunday but the story behind how it did so is instructive. About 450,000 litres of diesel fuel was supplied from Israel, funded by $10m (Dh36.7m) in aid from Qatar, which was responding to Hamas’ appeal for help.

This can only be a stopgap solution rather than the permanent remedy the people of the strip desperately seek. As a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East put it, the Gaza Strip is a disaster that “can only get worse before it gets better”. For the ordinary citizens of the strip, it seems that the cold, wet and hungry conditions they endured this week are likely to reoccur.