Last week, the Hamas celebrated the one-year anniversary of Pillar of Defense, that bizarre mosquito vs. F-16 conflict in which several Israeli buildings were hit by Gazan rockets and three Israelis were killed in their sleep (including one baby), and, on the other side of the border, large portions of Gaza were reduced to rubble.
Normal people wouldn’t celebrate this kind of misery, they would hang their heads in shame. But the Hamas is not staffed by normal people. The Hamas would literally swim in a pool of human refuse rather than recognize the right of its Jewish neighbors to the north and east to be alive.
A case in point: Jodi Rudoren’s report on raw sewage that’s been flooding the streets of a southern Gaza City neighborhood, the Islamist Hamas government shut down Gaza’s remaining power plant on Nov. 1, which, in turn, caused a pump station to flood.
In a crowded place like Gaza, one of the most crowded places on the planet, raw sewage flooding the streets means the outbreak of cholera and other plagues can’t be far behind. And three more sewage stations in Gaza City and 10 others across the Gaza Strip are about to overflow, sanitation officials told The Times.
Oh, and if Israelis living in luxury homes with great ocean views feel that this is someone else’s problem, it appears that 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage is gushing into the Mediterranean Sea daily.
Freshly caught fish, anyone? We get daily deliveries…
The Gaza sanitation department is warning that without sufficient electricity, it won’t be able to pump drinking water to Gaza homes. Gaza’s 1.7 million residents are now experiencing daily power failures of 12 to 18 hours. They sit in the dark, surrounded by pools of human excrement, and there’s no water.
Welcome to the 21st century’s Heart of Darkness, where yesterday’s bad things are today’s nostalgia.
Of course, we all know who is to blame for this – ask Juan R.I. Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, who two days ago wrote the immortal headline: Israel forces Gaza Children to Wade through Sewage as Creepy, Evil Blockade Continues.
Except that, according to Gisha, an Israeli group advocating freedom of movement to Gazans, even those with explosive overcoats, the number of Palestinians allowed to leave Gaza through Israel’s Erez crossing is up nearly 30 percent since July. And the number of trucks bringing goods, including fuel, into Gaza from Israel has increased 18 percent since July.
It’s exits and supplies through Egypt’s Rafah crossing which have been cut by two thirds since the Hamas patrons in Cairo had been hauled to prison.
Prof. Juan Cole desperately needs a new article generator.
The fact is, Hamas’s insistence that the only solution to Gaza’s problems is for the Jews to die en masse is coming back to haunt them. First, the Jews are not accepting this oprion for the moment. Second, Hamas’s defiant mode of supplies, through smuggling tunnels, is being effectively blocked by both Egypt and Israel. It’s a tossup right now who is more hell bent on bringing the Islamists down, Israel or the new rulers of Egypt. My money is on the Egyptians.
