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Thousands of Gazans left without electricity

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Thousands of Gazans have been left without electricity following Israel’s suspension of fuel shipments to the Hamas-controlled territory’s only power plant.

The power station was shut down on Monday evening after Israel refused to restart deliveries, despite warnings that fuel supplies were almost exhausted.

About 800,000 of the Gaza Strip’s 1.5 million residents lost power when the plant was shut down, the official from the territory’s sole power plant said.

An EU official said the power plant was running very low on fuel. The facility uses a special type of industrial fuel, not regular diesel. The EU’s last shipment was made on Nov 4.

Late on Monday, Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, revised his decision to keep the crossing completely sealed and authorised a "limited resumption" of supplies to the Gaza Strip.

The partial resumption of fuel shipments, expected to begin on Tuesday at 06:00 GMT, followed a request by Tony Blair, former UK prime minister and envoy of the Middle East Quartet – comprising the European Union, the US, Russia and the United Nations.

Fighters said they fired the rockets in response to an Israeli raid that killed six fighters on Nov. 4, but no damge.

Israel increased its economic and military siege of the Gaza Strip.

Under the terms of the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire, Israel has to lift some restrictions on aid but humanitarian groups say conditions in the coastal enclave continue to deteriorate.

Agencies

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Tragedy in nahr al bared

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By IRIN News – Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon

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He picked plastics and paper off the rubble-filled conveyor belt, Issam Sayyed indicated to a white house behind him pock-marked with bullet holes and with its roof caved in. “That’s my home,” said the father of nine, a Palestinian refugee displaced from the Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon, which was ruined in a 15-week war last year between the army and Islamist insurgents.

Soon the bulldozers clearing the ruins would knock down the white house along with the others, and the remains of Sayyed’s home would be passing before his hands as he sorted through the rubble for a wage of US$13 a day.

Across from the camp in the temporary accommodation known as the “barracks”, Sayyed’s wife was mourning the loss of their 10th child, a baby boy. He had died for lack of medical care just four days after his birth, according to his father.

The failure of the international community, and Arab states in particular, to fund an emergency humanitarian appeal for Nahr al-Bared means life for refugees like Sayyed will get just a little harder.

The Palestinian refugee agency’s (UNRWA’s) emergency appeal for $42 million to meet the immediate humanitarian needs of the 30,000 Palestinians displaced from Nahr al-Bared remains almost entirely unfunded.

Only the USA and Norway have donated, meaning UNRWA will this month decrease rental subsidies for 3,200 displaced families from $200 to $150 a month, and reduce items in the food basket each family receives.

In June, UNRWA said it needed about $445 million to rebuild the refugee camp – both the so-called New Camp, which sustained heavy damage, and the original, smaller Old Camp which was completely destroyed.

OPEC

So far UNRWA says it has received just $70 million, 88 percent from Western donations. OPEC, the 13-member Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which this year is forecast to make record breaking revenues of over $1 trillion, has donated just $5m to the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared. Six OPEC members are from the Middle East.

The $20 million cost of the projected 18-month rubble removal operation has been half met by the European Union (EU). In July 2007, Saudi Arabia donated $12 million to UNRWA to help displaced families pay rent and buy food, but as yet no Arab government has pledged to the long-term reconstruction of the camp.

“Buried under these thousands of tonnes of rubble are the dreams and achievements of a people who have waited 60 years for a just solution to their plight,” said UNRWA Deputy Commissioner-General Filipo Grandi at a press conference in Nahr al-Bared to launch the rubble removal on 29 October.

“Money is the most difficult challenge we face… I am very confident donors from west and east will deliver much-needed funds. What is at stake is the stability of the region and the well-being and future of 30,000 people. That is too important to ignore or forget.”

Protest

As he spoke, a handful of Palestinians held a noisy protest outside the press conference, accusing the international community of failing them.

“For those who believe in human rights what UNRWA is doing is a crime against humanity,” shouted an irate Arkan Bader, a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) faction in Nahr al-Bared.

“They have decreased medical funding by 15 percent. Gulf countries promised in June to pay half their commitments [to Nahr al-Bared] but until now they have paid nothing.”

Unexploded Ordnance

The magnitude of the task facing UNRWA and other agencies working on reconstruction and recovery in Nahr al-Bared was underlined by the assessment of a deminer leading the removal of unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the ruins of the camp.

Paul Leader, Nahr al-Bared task manager for Handicap International, which is contracted through UNRWA to clear UXO, said he expected the job could take 2-3 years to complete, despite an initial contract of just one year.

“Something of this magnitude and this level of contamination has never been done before,” said the veteran deminer, with experience in Iraq and the Balkans. “In any conventional war 10-15 percent of explosives do not explode. And there were a lot thrown in here.”

(Originally published in IRIN – www.irinnews.org – Nov 5, 2008)

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Israel sends Iran war warning to Obama

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Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has called on the White House not to rule out the military option for retarding Iran’s nuclear program.

In a meeting with visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday, Barak said Israel is ‘convinced that Iran continues to try to build a nuclear weapon’.

Tehran, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), denies the Israeli claim and insists that its enrichment program is solely directed at the civilian applications of the technology.

Senator Barack Obama, the 44th president-elect of United States, has vowed to engage Iran with dialogue to resolve the nuclear dispute.

"We don’t rule out any option. We recommend others don’t rule out any option either," Ehud Barak said after the meeting with Rice in regard to Obama’s Iran policy.

Earlier on Thursday, Israel had expressed its opposition to potential Tehran-Washington reconciliation efforts — Tel Aviv’s first dissonance with an Obama administration.

Israeli Foreign Minister and Kadima leader Tzipi Livni said dialogue with Tehran would be ‘interpreted as weakness’.

"We need to continue the pressure on Iran by intensifying effective sanctions," Livni said on Israel Radio, urging the continuation of the Bush carrot-and-stick approach toward Tehran.

In dealing with Iran, the Bush White House introduced incentives and sanctions, as well as threats of launching strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in order to persuade Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities.

Senator Obama has promised to change the Bush policy, which has failed to yield results on the Iranian issue.

The UN nuclear watchdog, which has extensively monitored Iran’s nuclear activities since 2003, concedes it is not in a position to fully clarify the nature of the Iranian nuclear program.

The agency, however, announced in its latest Iran report that its inspectors have not found any ‘components of a nuclear weapon’ or ‘related nuclear physics studies’ in the country.

MD/AA

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