GAZA CITY — Israel locked down the Gaza Strip entirely on Friday, January 18, denying access to the weekly UN aid trucks, while resumed deadly raids on Palestinians claiming more lives.
"Gaza is completely shut down. This will only add to an already dire situation," the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Christopher Gunness told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"It is imperative that these crossings are opened so that the dire situation in Gaza does not deteriorate further, inflicting further misery on one and half million people" who live there.
Before Friday, UNRWA was every day delivering up to 20 trucks filled with basic food aid into the coastal territory, one of the most densely populated places on earth.
Gunness warned that the increasing isolation of Gaza will only lead to the further radicalization of its demoralized population.
"Things are so desperate in Gaza that there is no cement for making graves so people are hacking up the roads to try and acquire building materials for burial rites," he said.
"Hospitals are giving out sheets because there simply aren't enough shrouds. Palestinians even in death are affected by this shut-down."
Israel has already slapped economic sanctions and closed the Strip's main Rafah crossing since June, when Hamas too over the impoverished territory following deadly battles with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah.
With nearly one million out of the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million population living on handouts, the UN warned that the strip's economy would collapse if its crossings continue to be closed by Israel.
International donors have pledged billion of dollars to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his West Bank government, but UN agencies and charities doubted that the aid would trickle down to the must vulnerable Gazans.
More Killings
Israeli killing of Palestinians in Gaza went unabated Friday, January, taking to at least 34 the number of Palestinians killed since Monday.
The Israeli army killed a Hamas member earlier in the day in the town of Jabaliya, and another resistance fighter in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus.
Another Israeli raid targeted the headquarters of the Interior Ministry of the sacked Hamas-led unity government in Gaza, killing one elderly woman and injuring up to 50 others.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed on Thursday to wage a "war" on Gaza resistance fighters to stop rocket firing into Israeli cities neighboring the Gaza Strip.
On Thursday night, five Palestinians were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.
They included three resistance fighters and a woman whose donkey cart was struck by an Israeli missile.
On Wednesday, a teenager, his father and an uncle died when a missile hit their car in Gaza City, stoking Palestinian anger provoked by deadly Israeli raids on Tuesday, the worst single day of violence in more than a year, when 19 Palestinians were killed including a son of senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar.
Some 130 people, including many civilians, have died in Gaza in the strikes since Israelis and the Palestinian Authority formally relaunched the Middle East peace process in late November.
The Mahmoud Abbas's government in the West Bank has condemned the Israeli operations as "a slap in the face" to efforts by US President George W. Bush to achieve a peace treaty by year's end.
And lay Palestinians do not see peace on the horizon.
"There is no hope here, so the people join the resistance," Silmi Salama, 55, who lost a son and a nephew — both aged 20 — in Tuesday's deadly Israeli raid, told AFP Friday.
"Look at these kids," he said, gesturing to a group of wide-eyed boys perched on plastic chairs beneath a canopy of green Hamas banners and professionally produced posters of martyrs.
"They see the fighting, they see the people dying, and then they want to take up weapons and join the resistance," added Salama, his eyes are red and weary, but the tears have dried.
Source: Israel Blocks Aid 
Jan 19, 2008
