Israeli blockade leaves much of Gaza City in the dark
A fuel shortage shuts down the electric plant. Relief supplies also are blocked from entering the Gaza Strip, leaving a United Nations agency without food for the Palestinian territory's many needy families.
Reporting from Gaza City and Jerusalem — Much of Gaza City fell into darkness Thursday night after an Israeli blockade, tightened in response to Palestinian hostilities, caused the city's electricity plant to run critically low on fuel and shut down.
Israel also barred 30 truckloads of relief supplies from entering the Gaza Strip, leaving a United Nations agency without food to dole out to needy families that make up half the Palestinian territory's 1.5 million people.
The partial blackout and the food shortage were the most severe consequences of recent hostilities that have shattered a 5-month-old cease-fire along Israel's border with Gaza. With the cease-fire accord due to expire next month, Israel and Hamas, the Islamic group that governs Gaza, appeared to be bracing for another round of heavy fighting.
Gaza electricity: An article in Friday's Section A about an Israeli blockade that caused a Gaza Strip electricity plant to shut down said the plant had a 140,000-megawatt capacity. The plant's capacity is 140 megawatts.
Hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza City joined a candlelight march, organized by a Hamas-backed group, to protest what they called an Israeli siege.
"This is a crime against innocent civilians," declared Ziad Abu Khousa, 23, who wondered aloud how he and other students at Gaza City's Islamic University could manage to study for midterm exams without lighting at night. "Half the population of Gaza are women and children, and they have nothing to do with the fighting."Many refugees from the 1948 war over Israel's creation and their descendants live in shantytowns, and nearly all depend on the U.N. for flour, sugar, rice, canned meat and other staples, delivered from Israel.
Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have renounced the cease-fire. But Hamas has permitted sporadic rocket fire into Israel, and Israeli forces this month have made two brief pinpoint raids into Gaza, killing 10 militants.
As required by the cease-fire deal, Israel in June began easing a blockade it had imposed last year after Hamas forcibly took control of Gaza from Fatah, a more moderate, U.S.-backed Palestinian group.
But on Nov. 4, after discovering a cross-border tunnel dug by Gaza militants, Israel shut down the commercial crossings where basic goods pass into Gaza. Israeli authorities allowed in only a limited amount of fuel on Tuesday.
John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency operations in Gaza, said the Defense Ministry had promised late Wednesday that it would allow the 30 truckloads of food and other humanitarian supplies to cross into Gaza on Thursday.
