Thousands of Gaza Arabs, including young teenagers, are going out of their minds because Egypt’s destruction of smuggling tunnels has left them without an addictive painkiller. The London Times reported.
Withdrawal systems have driven patients to the edge of suicide after not being able to able to obtain Tramadol, an addictive prescription drug that was bought from tunnel smugglers at one-tenth the price on the local black market.
The Hamas Health Ministry told the newspaper that the heroin-like effect of Tramadol has resulted in a 50 percent increase of drug addicts seeking help. The drug not only is 10 times more expensive than it was before Egypt started to close the tunnels, but it also is difficult to find even on the black market
The drug dopes patients so that they can tune out their living hell.
Gaza once was a decent place to live and earn a living under the “occupation” after Egypt gladly surrendered the hell-hole known as the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War in 1967.
Israel gave Gaza residents their first opportunity to work in Israel, work under decent conditions for Jewish farmers in Gaza, and operate their own affairs to a limited extent instead under the aegis of Cairo.
Yasser Arafat turned everything around in the late 1980s and introduced terrorism as a way of life.
However, the London Times report blames Israel – who else? – for the painkiller crisis even though it was Egypt and not Israel that is on the tunnel warpath.
The logic, so to speak, works like this:
Gazans use Tramadol because of “the hardship of living in the war-torn territory under an eight-year Israeli blockade,” referring to the blockade that has been all but lifted except for suicide belts and other materials that Hamas would call humanitarian aid. Egypt has used an iron fist at the Rafah land crossing to enforce an off-an-on blockade.
The London Times continued to connect dots from different pages by blaming the ” worsening economic conditions in the aftermath of the summer war [with Israel],” referring to the latest in a series of min-wars that Hamas has launched.
The newspaper took the time to drill into readers’ psyches about “the 51-day war with Israel last year, in which 2,200 Palestinians were killed and more than 17,000 homes destroyed, [which] boosted the popularity of the ‘escapist’ drug.”
Of course, in the eyes of the leftists, Israel is to blame for Hamas’ war because it still “occupies” Jerusalem’s Old City, Efrat, Maaleh Adumim and other areas previously uninhabited and which the Palestinian Authority makes out as part their ancient homeland that Arafat manufactured.
In the eyes of the bleeding heart liberals, Israel also is to blame for beating back the Egyptians in the 1967 war, which perhaps was caused by having become a country in 1948.
Now that Gaza have to live without addictive painkillers and with the misery of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, it would be interesting to see the results of a free election, which is only theoretical since it cannot happen under Hamas.
The supposed election would give them the choice to return to Egyptian rule, remain under the Hamas regime, or go back to the “occupation” when their economic and political freedoms were blossoming.
Given the last 20 years of fear and loathing under the Palestinian Authority, Gazans might prefer a fourth alternative – Tramadol.