Briefing | Siege mentality

Deadly protests on Gaza’s border with Israel

While the territory remains isolated and desperate the only recourse for Gazans is violence

|GAZA CITY AND MALAKA
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MAZEN QASSAS was supposed to be in bed, not hunched over a man missing a chunk of his thigh. The surgeon had just finished a 12-hour shift at Al-Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital. But after a nap he was back treating people who had been hurt in the territory’s bloodiest day of violence in four years. The hospital was overflowing with patients so Dr Qassas was brief. He unwound a bandage to reveal a gaping wound, the work of a sniper’s bullet, gave instructions to nurses and moved on. He had 50 patients waiting. “Yesterday was worse than the last war, because the rush came all at once,” he noted gloomily.

The bloodshed on May 14th started after tens of thousands of people descended on the barrier that separates Gaza from Israel. It was the latest of six weeks of weekly protests known as the “Great Return March”, nominally an effort to reclaim the lands their grandparents fled or were pushed out from during the creation of Israel. It also coincided with the contentious relocation of America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Palestinians regard as yet another injustice (see article).

In some places the barrier is a concrete wall topped with remote-controlled machineguns. In others it is merely a chain-link fence. Only a few protesters tried to cross it. Most hung well back in fields or on dusty patches of ground, where music played on loudspeakers and sandwiches and soft drinks were on sale. “People came to watch other people,” said one.

At Malaka, east of Gaza City (see map), protesters ran up a raised bank to burn tyres or cut through coils of barbed wire. Many came back down on stretchers. As the Israeli army sent tear-gas canisters whizzing overhead into Gaza, kites sailed the other way, dangling cans of burning fuel meant to ignite Israeli farms. Snipers’ rifles cracked amid shouting and the blaring sirens of ambulances. By the next morning the death toll had reached 60, according to Gaza’s health ministry, with more than 2,700 others injured.

The edge of reason

The response to the march was a public-relations disaster for Israel, which was deemed by many countries to have overreacted. No Israelis were killed and few were injured. Most of the protesters were unarmed. Those with weapons tended to have slingshots and Molotov cocktails, neither of which posed much threat to soldiers more than 100 metres away. Some of the wounded were not even trying to rush the fence. One young man was shot walking on a dirt path parallel to the border but 100m metres from it.

Israel’s army argued that its actions were proportionate, a justified attempt to defend a border. Soldiers did try to disperse the crowds with tear-gas, but it was ineffective in an open, windy area. Most of the injured were shot in their legs—meant to wound, not kill, though some died anyway from lack of proper medical care. And in several instances militants tried to plant improvised explosive devices near the fence. Hamas says that most of the men shot dead were its own people.

Individually, few if any of the protesters posed a danger. The threat, simply put, is that Israel does not have enough troops to stop 2m people from crossing a fence. It controls them through fear—through the belief that the armistice line is an inviolable barrier. The marches chipped away at that fear. A few young protesters marvelled that they had never been so close to the fence before.

The shooting restored the trepidation, but only in the short run. As a tactical measure, firing thousands of rounds at a crowd is a successful deterrent. But it does nothing to resolve the festering conflict that sent people to the fence in the first place. If the blockade of Gaza persists, they will surely try again.

Outbursts of violence such as the events of May 14th have earned Gaza a reputation as a war zone. More often it is a place of grinding boredom. Few of its 2m residents can leave the enclave. They have been hemmed in by Israeli and Egyptian blockades since 2007, when Hamas, a militant Islamist group, took control of Gaza.

The crossing to Israel at Erez is open only to some businessmen, people needing urgent medical care and a few others (see chart). For most Gazans the only way out is at Rafah, on the border with Egypt. But since 2015 the crossing has been open on 129 days, an average of five-and-a-half weeks a year. Only 63,000 people have been able to go to Egypt. Smuggling tunnels have been closed. Almost everyone is stuck.

So is Gazan commerce. Rafah is largely closed to it. Israel tightly controls the flow of goods through another crossing, at Kerem Shalom. For decades Gazans had sent their wares, from strawberries to furniture, to Israel. Now that market is closed. The result is empty factories, rusting machinery and unemployment. Over two-fifths of Gazans are jobless; nearly two-thirds of young people have no work. Without it many families cannot afford even basic staples and rely on charity to survive.

Sewers and reapers

Neglect and the Israeli bombardment have shattered infrastructure. The territory cannot treat its sewage, so it stores the stuff in fetid open-air pools or dumps it straight into the Mediterranean. Sewage and seawater seep into Gaza’s depleted aquifer, rendering most water supplies unfit for human consumption, according to the UN. Electricity comes on for three hours a day, often at odd times. Gazans are used to waking in the middle of the night to wash their clothes and charge their mobile phones. Children study by candlelight.

Despair at such conditions brought Mujahid Abu Shuayb to a protest last month. He lost his job at a marble factory last year. He cannot afford to start a family. “I was bored and this was something new,” he says. Now he is in a hospital bed watching his leg swell and blacken after being shot. Doctors expect to amputate it. A better-equipped hospital might have saved it, but Mr Abu Shuayb cannot get permission to cross into Israel for treatment.

Crowded, heavily populated by refugees and poorer than the other Palestinian territories on the West Bank, where much of the population has been settled for generations, Gaza has a turbulent past. In the 20th century it passed through the hands of the Ottomans, the British and the Egyptians, until Israel captured it in 1967.

The Oslo peace accords in 1993 created the Palestinian Authority (PA) and gave it limited autonomy in the Israeli-occupied territories. Israel withdrew its troops from Gaza, except for settlements and military bases. This became hard to sustain, especially during the bloody fighting of the second intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hawkish prime minister, withdrew from Gaza completely in 2005. The PA had day-to-day control, but not for long. Yasser Arafat, founder and leader of Fatah, the main Palestinian nationalist group, and subsequently head of the PA, had made Gaza his base. The Israeli pull-out and his death in 2004 opened the way for Hamas to take charge.

In January 2006 Palestinians voted for a new parliament. The result was a shock victory for Hamas, as Palestinians voiced their anger at the corruption of Fatah, which had previously held power. This broke the Palestinian movement apart. Fatah refused to join a coalition government with Hamas. Months of fighting between the two groups in Gaza culminated in a week-long battle in June 2007 that left Hamas in control but Gaza under a blockade.

Since 2007 Israel has fought three wars against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. The last and deadliest dragged on for 51 days in the summer of 2014 and shattered Gaza. More than 2,000 people were killed in relentless bombing, most of them civilians; another 100,000 were displaced. Hamas celebrates the war as a victory simply because it survived.

For Israelis, this confirms their worst fears. Give the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and they will use it to fire rockets at Tel Aviv. Hostility to Hamas is shared by Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president, who led a coup against a Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013. Hamas was founded as an offshoot of the Brotherhood (though last year it severed ties with the group). Mr Sisi accuses Hamas of aiding jihadists in Sinai. His claims have some truth to them. Hamas has allowed scores of Egyptian militants to slip into Gaza and seek refuge there.

Gaza is even caught up in the Middle East’s wider feuds. Qatar has long been close to Hamas and for years it was Gaza’s main patron. It donated $1bn after the war in 2014 to build thousands of new homes and fix the coast road. But Qatar faces an embargo of its own, imposed by four Arab states, to punish it for backing Islamists. It has now pulled back its support for such groups, including Hamas. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s neighbour and rival, is trying to usurp its influence in Gaza.

Fault finding

Gazans, though, mostly blame other Palestinians for their daily misery. Six reconciliation deals between Hamas and Fatah have yielded little more than piles of worthless paper. In the past year Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, based in the West Bank, has imposed sanctions on the strip, halting shipments of medicine and cutting payments for Gaza’s electricity. Last October Hamas and Fatah signed yet another deal in Cairo, agreeing that the PA would take power in Gaza. Hamas was happy to cede control of the sewers and schools—to make someone else responsible for the awful conditions.

It refused to hand over control of the security forces, however, let alone relinquish its arsenal of rockets. When the agreement took effect, smartly uniformed PA soldiers took over the Hamas checkpoint at Erez. But the Hamas men just moved to a cluster of cramped trailers nearby. Foreign visitors must still obtain permits from Hamas and endure a barrage of bizarre questions from its secret police.

Israelis usually insist that the plight of Gaza is not their problem, as they ceased to occupy it in 2005. It is a nuisance but rarely intrudes on Israelis’ daily life. Yet this is false. Israel is still deeply involved in Gaza. Its army controls Gaza’s coast and air space. Israel decides how far its fishermen may sail offshore, and whether Gazans can use 3G services on their mobile phones. It oversees a population registry that tracks every child born in a Gazan hospital. The sewage that pours into the sea washes ashore on Israel’s beaches.

Over the years, Israeli officials have proposed ways to ease the suffering. Infrastructure projects are suggested, or schemes to let tens of thousands of day labourers cross into Israel. None gets serious consideration. Gazans have little support in parliament and even less in Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government.

Lifting the blockade would ease the hardship. But Gazans would still be stateless, and for all its rhetoric, Hamas cannot change that by force. Its meagre arsenal is not a serious threat to the Middle East’s strongest army. The group fears that losing its weapons would mean losing its identity, turning it into “Fatah with beards”, as some officials joke. Yet many Gazans grumble (quietly, since Hamas has informants everywhere) that it has, in effect, given up the fight. Most of the time its weapons sit unused. “They talk about resistance, but the only ones fighting Israel are boys with stones,” says a woman who lost a son in the protests.

Violence begets non-violence

In recent months Hamas has begun to praise non-violent resistance, a big step for a group psychologically wedded to political violence. A commitment to armed resistance is written into Hamas’s charter. The group’s leadership pays homage to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. So far it is rhetoric. Yet it puts Hamas in an awkward position. A local activist dreamed up the protests. Hamas quickly co-opted them, sending text messages to encourage support and laying on buses to the frontier. “There is a wild tiger that was besieged and starved through 11 years, and now it has been set free,” said Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza. Earlier he had issued a warning to Israelis: “We will take down the border and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”

After the latest bloodshed, Hamas leaders worried they would lose control of the tiger. On a radio station run by Islamic Jihad, a rival militant group, hosts urged their comrades to retaliate. Israeli jets carried out airstrikes. An army spokesman threatened more to come if the protests continued. Israel has more than doubled the standing force of troops ready for action around Gaza. All this raises the prospect of a war that Gaza can ill afford.

Rattled by the violence, Hamas pulled back. May 15th, the day after the clashes, was meant to be the climax of the protests. Nakba (“Catastrophe”) Day marks the mass displacement of Palestinians during the establishment of Israel 70 years earlier. Only a few hundred people turned up at Malaka, and few of them approached the fence. One man brandished a kitchen knife and challenged Israeli soldiers to come and fight. Another commandeered a frozen-drink cart and used its loudspeaker to hurl insults in Hebrew. The feeling of solidarity was gone.

Back at the hospital, Mustafa Murtaja lay in another crowded room. He had joined the protests out of despair and took a bullet to the leg. His injuries were relatively minor, but he fears the weeks of recovery may cost him his job on a poultry farm. But he might lose it anyway, as his struggling employer talks of lay-offs. And with nothing but a bleak future in prospect, he and those like him have little reason to turn their backs on confrontation. “For sure I would go back and protest again. It’s kind of a challenge,” he says. “What else do I have to hope for as a young man here?”

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Siege mentality"

Gaza: There is a better way

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