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Wednesday, September 03, 2014 12:40:16 AM
Gaza Crossing Reflects Israel-Hamas Unreality
By JODI RUDORENSEPT. 2, 2014 .. with links..
A Palestinian woman getting ready to travel into Gaza through the Erez crossing last month.
The terminal has the capacity to handle 45,000 people a day. Its current traffic is 400
a day or less. Credit Amir Cohen/Reuters
EREZ CROSSING, at the Israel-Gaza border — The terminal here through which travelers pass between Israel and the Gaza Strip was surreal and sad even before this summer’s violent conflict between Israel and Hamas.
At 375,000 square feet, it is a vast, modern, high-tech airport-style hangar. It was all but empty Sunday afternoon, as usual, with more workers in sight than crossers, quiet except for the distant whoosh of a floor-cleaning machine.
Completed in February 2007 at a cost of about $60 million, the terminal has the capacity to handle 45,000 people a day. Its current traffic: 400 or less. The radical reduction in exit permits issued by Israel was part of a broader clampdown on Gaza after Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction, wrested control of the coastal territory in a bloody coup in June 2007.
Related Coverage
Israel Claims Nearly 1,000 Acres of West Bank Land Near BethlehemAUG. 31, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/world/middleeast/israel-claims-nearly-1000-acres-of-west-bank-land-near-bethlehem.html
As Truce Holds, Dazed Gazans Get to WorkAUG. 27, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/world/middleeast/gaza-strip.html
Erez was where the first Israeli civilian was killed during the latest conflict, a 37-year-old volunteer felled by a mortar shell while distributing food to soldiers. In the fighting’s final days, another attack on Erez wounded four people, temporarily closing the crossing. Now, it is one of the focal points of the cease-fire agreement that finally halted the hostilities last week with an unspecific promise for “freedom of people’s movement.”
Shlomo Tsaban, who runs Erez for the Israeli Defense Ministry, said his boss asked him last week to “maybe get ready for 5,000 people per day.” That would still be far below the level in September 2000, a month when Palestinian workers alone accounted for 500,000 exits through Erez, according to Gisha, an Israeli organization that tracks the crossing.
Mr. Tsaban, 54, a retired colonel, is of a generation that remembers when there were no formal crossings. He said that when he was growing up in Ashkelon, less than 10 miles from Gaza, his mother would take him on the bus to Gaza twice a week to shop for vegetables and fish.
He also remembers the 2004 suicide bombing at Erez that killed three Israeli soldiers and one civilian worker, the day in 2007 when leaders of the rival Fatah faction poured through the crossing after Hamas routed them from Gaza, and another suicide bombing in 2008.
We met on Sunday because his rifle-toting guards had stopped me for taking notes as I tried to cross into Gaza. They read what I had scrawled in my notebook — “12 passport-control booths, none open for business; a Palestinian family arriving with a girl in a wheelchair and two luggage carts laden with colorful suitcases” — and then made me go through the elaborate security check normally required only for entry into Israel.
“This is a secret crossing — this is Gaza, this is Hamas, this is animal,” Mr. Tsaban said by way of explanation afterward, in halting English. “This is not a normal crossing.”
Not at all normal. After passport control, travelers follow blue signs with arrows that simply say “Gaza” in English, Hebrew and Arabic through a maze of movable gray walls. Then there is a turnstile that is tough to navigate with even a small suitcase. About 30 yards later is the concrete barrier that separates Israel from Gaza, where travelers wait until a steel door mysteriously opens.
The return trip into Israel feels like something out of a sci-fi film. You pass, alone, having relinquished all belongings including passport and mobile phone, through a series of glass booths between locked doors. To move, you wait for red lights to turn green, sometimes aided by muffled instructions from the Israelis at the controls behind more glass several stories overhead.
The Palestinian side has its own strangeness, reflecting the seven-year Hamas-Fatah split that was supposedly resolved this spring with a reconciliation government that has yet to take hold.
After a half-mile walk on a fenced-in path covered by corrugated metal, there is a checkpoint known as Hamsa-Hamsa, Arabic for “Five-Five,” where a man in a trailer writes down passport numbers and sends them to the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. Then you take a three-minute, $3 cab ride to the Hamas-controlled checkpoint some call Arba-Arba (“Four-Four”), where luggage is searched for contraband.
Earlier this year, Hamas replaced the dilapidated trailers that had been its checkpoint with a bigger, more modern facility. It was destroyed by Israeli strikes during the war.
A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2014, in The
International New York Times. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/world/middleeast/gaza-crossing-reflects-israel-hamas-unreality.html
Kill Palestinian civilians with over-compensating military action. Repress their economy and ability to
work in Israel. Bomb them again. All part of a miserably morbid and illegal cycle for some 50 years.
By JODI RUDORENSEPT. 2, 2014 .. with links..
A Palestinian woman getting ready to travel into Gaza through the Erez crossing last month.
The terminal has the capacity to handle 45,000 people a day. Its current traffic is 400
a day or less. Credit Amir Cohen/Reuters
EREZ CROSSING, at the Israel-Gaza border — The terminal here through which travelers pass between Israel and the Gaza Strip was surreal and sad even before this summer’s violent conflict between Israel and Hamas.
At 375,000 square feet, it is a vast, modern, high-tech airport-style hangar. It was all but empty Sunday afternoon, as usual, with more workers in sight than crossers, quiet except for the distant whoosh of a floor-cleaning machine.
Completed in February 2007 at a cost of about $60 million, the terminal has the capacity to handle 45,000 people a day. Its current traffic: 400 or less. The radical reduction in exit permits issued by Israel was part of a broader clampdown on Gaza after Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction, wrested control of the coastal territory in a bloody coup in June 2007.
Related Coverage
Israel Claims Nearly 1,000 Acres of West Bank Land Near BethlehemAUG. 31, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/world/middleeast/israel-claims-nearly-1000-acres-of-west-bank-land-near-bethlehem.html
As Truce Holds, Dazed Gazans Get to WorkAUG. 27, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/world/middleeast/gaza-strip.html
Erez was where the first Israeli civilian was killed during the latest conflict, a 37-year-old volunteer felled by a mortar shell while distributing food to soldiers. In the fighting’s final days, another attack on Erez wounded four people, temporarily closing the crossing. Now, it is one of the focal points of the cease-fire agreement that finally halted the hostilities last week with an unspecific promise for “freedom of people’s movement.”
Shlomo Tsaban, who runs Erez for the Israeli Defense Ministry, said his boss asked him last week to “maybe get ready for 5,000 people per day.” That would still be far below the level in September 2000, a month when Palestinian workers alone accounted for 500,000 exits through Erez, according to Gisha, an Israeli organization that tracks the crossing.
Mr. Tsaban, 54, a retired colonel, is of a generation that remembers when there were no formal crossings. He said that when he was growing up in Ashkelon, less than 10 miles from Gaza, his mother would take him on the bus to Gaza twice a week to shop for vegetables and fish.
He also remembers the 2004 suicide bombing at Erez that killed three Israeli soldiers and one civilian worker, the day in 2007 when leaders of the rival Fatah faction poured through the crossing after Hamas routed them from Gaza, and another suicide bombing in 2008.
We met on Sunday because his rifle-toting guards had stopped me for taking notes as I tried to cross into Gaza. They read what I had scrawled in my notebook — “12 passport-control booths, none open for business; a Palestinian family arriving with a girl in a wheelchair and two luggage carts laden with colorful suitcases” — and then made me go through the elaborate security check normally required only for entry into Israel.
“This is a secret crossing — this is Gaza, this is Hamas, this is animal,” Mr. Tsaban said by way of explanation afterward, in halting English. “This is not a normal crossing.”
Not at all normal. After passport control, travelers follow blue signs with arrows that simply say “Gaza” in English, Hebrew and Arabic through a maze of movable gray walls. Then there is a turnstile that is tough to navigate with even a small suitcase. About 30 yards later is the concrete barrier that separates Israel from Gaza, where travelers wait until a steel door mysteriously opens.
The return trip into Israel feels like something out of a sci-fi film. You pass, alone, having relinquished all belongings including passport and mobile phone, through a series of glass booths between locked doors. To move, you wait for red lights to turn green, sometimes aided by muffled instructions from the Israelis at the controls behind more glass several stories overhead.
The Palestinian side has its own strangeness, reflecting the seven-year Hamas-Fatah split that was supposedly resolved this spring with a reconciliation government that has yet to take hold.
After a half-mile walk on a fenced-in path covered by corrugated metal, there is a checkpoint known as Hamsa-Hamsa, Arabic for “Five-Five,” where a man in a trailer writes down passport numbers and sends them to the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. Then you take a three-minute, $3 cab ride to the Hamas-controlled checkpoint some call Arba-Arba (“Four-Four”), where luggage is searched for contraband.
Earlier this year, Hamas replaced the dilapidated trailers that had been its checkpoint with a bigger, more modern facility. It was destroyed by Israeli strikes during the war.
A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2014, in The
International New York Times. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/world/middleeast/gaza-crossing-reflects-israel-hamas-unreality.html
Kill Palestinian civilians with over-compensating military action. Repress their economy and ability to
work in Israel. Bomb them again. All part of a miserably morbid and illegal cycle for some 50 years.
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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