Gaza, Vexed by Floods, Gets Fuel and Power

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/world/middleeast/gaza-vexed-by-floods-gets-fuel-and-power.html

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GAZA — Gaza’s lone power plant sputtered back to life on Sunday for the first time in seven weeks, bringing relief to the Palestinian coastal enclave where a lack of cheap fuel has contributed to the overflow of raw sewage, 21-hour blackouts and flooding after a ferocious winter storm.

Palestinian officials said that a $10 million grant from Qatar was covering the cost of two weeks’ worth of industrial diesel that started entering Gaza by truckload from Israel.

The Qatari grant ended a bitter round of finger-pointing between Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, and its rival, the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank. The Authority, which unlike Hamas has dealings with Israel, can always ship fuel to Gaza via Israel, but Hamas has accused the Authority of imposing high taxes on the fuel and has refused to buy it.

Gaza’s supply of subsidized fuel from Egypt has also dried up since the Egyptian Army clamped down last summer on the smuggling tunnels running beneath the Gaza-Egypt border.

Ihab al-Ghussein, a spokesman for the Hamas government, said Qatar was also preparing to send a ship with diesel through an Israeli port, enough to keep the plant running for three months.

Ahmed Abu al-Amreen of the Gaza Power Authority said that the plant would provide Gaza’s 1.7 million residents with two eight-hour shifts of electricity every 24 hours.

Since the power plant shut down on Nov. 1, Gaza has depended on electricity purchased from Israel and Egypt, but that met only about 30 percent of the demand in the coastal territory. When the storm descended on Gaza late last week and temperatures plummeted, Hamas appealed to Qatar for help. Qatar urged the Palestinian Authority to send in the fuel and pledged to cover the cost.

An official in the office of the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process said staff members had been working closely with American officials to encourage the Qataris to reach an agreement with the Palestinian Authority.

The skies cleared in Gaza on Sunday after days of flooding and cold. Mustafa Sawaf of the Hamas Ministry of Social Affairs said he expected that most of the 900 families who had been evacuated to shelters would be back in their homes by evening.

In Israel, there was mounting public criticism of the authorities as the winter storm waned. The Jerusalem area experienced its heaviest snowfall in about 50 years, and tens of thousands of Israelis were left without electricity, some for up to three days. Many Palestinian households in the West Bank also lost power.

The main highways in and out of Jerusalem were closed from Thursday to Sunday morning because of the treacherous conditions and abandoned cars, leaving many motorists stranded.

The Israeli government and representatives of the state-owned electricity company rejected the criticism, saying the high cost of laying electricity cables underground and investing in snow-clearing equipment had to be weighed carefully, given the rarity of such fierce storms in the area.

In a separate development, a Lebanese Army soldier shot and killed an Israeli soldier who was driving along the Israeli-Lebanese border near Rosh Hanikra, according to the Israeli military. The Lebanese Army did not immediately comment and the details of the episode remained unclear, but Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported that Lebanese Army forces had fired at Israeli forces along the border near the Naqoura crossing.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesman, said the military had protested to UNIFIL, the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, about what he called an “outrageous breach of Israel’s sovereignty.” Israeli forces went on alert along the border, which has remained tense but relatively calm in recent years.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.