THE smell hits you from a mile away. On the southern edge of Gaza City the crystalline blue Mediterranean is being transmuted into a vast, bobbing pool of raw sewage, the product of half a million people with nowhere else for their effluent to flow. A three-way row between Gaza, the West Bank and Israel has seen electricity supplies cut to a trickle. One casualty has been the strip’s sewage treatment stations.
It is ten years since Hamas, an Islamist political party with a lethal military wing, took over Gaza. In June 2007 it threw out its rivals from Fatah, the nationalist faction that runs the Palestine Liberation Organisation. A year earlier, it had beaten Fatah in elections held in the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war. The split left Fatah to rule the West Bank, Hamas to control Gaza, and both sides to conspire in an elaborate fiction that the two still form a single whole. The intervening decade has not been kind to Gaza, its people or even its new masters. Hamas...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2tm1kVH
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