Israel tightens closure on Gaza, threatens "disengagement" (Roundup)

Oct 29, 2007, 14:19 GMT

Tel Aviv - Israel threatened Monday to severe its economic and infrastructural ties with the Gaza Strip if rocket attacks from the area continued, a day after it began curbing fuel supplies to the impoverished coastal salient.

Further tightening its closure of the Strip, it also closed its Sufa border crossing with the southern Gaza Strip, one of two crossings that had remained open during the past months for the passage of humanitarian aid.

The only outlet now remaining open to humanitarian aid is is the southern-most Kerem Shalom crossing, a military spokeswoman said.

While European Commissioner for External Affairs Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in Jerusalem she was 'concerned' over the tougher sanctions and warned against 'collective punishment,' the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said closing the crossing enhanced the 'vulnerability' of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants, many of whom rely on food hand outs.

Riyad Malki, the spokesman for the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas-appointed 'caretaker' government in the West Bank, called the sanctions 'unacceptable,' but denied Abbas was suspending his talks with Israel over them.

But Israel's Highest Court of Justice late Sunday rejected a petition by human rights groups against the sanctions. It did order the Israeli state to submit an argument as to why the sanctions should not be prevented within five days.

An Israeli soldier and three Palestinians, among them two Hamas militants and civilian, were also killed in gunbattles in the south and north of the Strip, as Israeli troops penetrated the areas to act against the rocket launchers.

Israel began Sunday reducing its weekly supply of petrol to Gaza by 15 per cent and of diesel by 13 per cent.

It also wants to cut electricity by 1 per cent - or 15 minutes each day - to those areas in the Strip from where the rockets are fired, but this move is pending a review by Israel's attorney-general Monday, a defence ministry spokesman said.

The electricity cut would have little impact and was meant mainly as a 'signal' to the radical Islamic Hamas movement ruling the Strip, said Shlomo Dror, the spokesman for the defence ministry body charged with coordinating government policy with the military.

Israel however would not touch the supply of crude diesel to Gaza's main power plant, which used up some 1.740 litres a week, he said.

'We are sending a signal to the Palestinians. We tell them that the tendency is to go to a disengagement,' he told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa.

'Israel won't keep supplying all that they want, when they fire Qassams at us. So Israel is saying, this equation mustn't exist.

If Hamas Gaza chose to continue supporting the rocket attacks, rather than to stop them, 'it will have to begin thinking how to bring in fuel, maybe through Egypt, and how to establish its own powerplant,' he warned.

He said Israel decided to close the Sufa crossing after it came under daily rocket and mortar attacks, along with other border crossings.

Closing it was 'also a very clear signal' to Hamas. 'Hamas itself sits and fires at the crossings. If it fires at at the crossings, it will pay the price. It will have to explain to the people why no food is entering Gaza that day,' said Dror, warning:

'Now there is one crossing only. If they keep firing there too, we will close Kerem Shalom until the firing stops.'

A WFP spokeswoman in Jerusalem, Kirstie Campbell, acknowledged both Kerem Shalom and Sufa 'have been under sustained mortar and rocket attacks from Palestinian militants.'

But she warned that the remaining crossing of Kerem Shalom lacked the capacity to meet Gaza's daily needs of basic foods. While Sufa had the capacity to let through about 100 trucks a day, Kerem Shalom had about half that, she said.

'It's an extremely worrying trend,' she told dpa. 'The fact is that if we have just one crossing, than the vulnerability of the population in Gaza will be enhanced, because it just takes one rocket on one crossing, instead of just two rockets on two crossings (to close the Strip entirely.) So it's extremely worrying.'

She said some 70 per cent of Gaza's non-refugee population, to which WFP is tending, lived on less than 1.2 US dollars per person per day, up from 55 per cent in June, when Israel suspended all non-essential commerce with Gaza after Hamas' violent take-over of the Strip.

She said three-quarters of all Gazans now relied on monthly food parcels handed out by the WFP and other bodies.

In a letter to Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, the Israeli Peace Now movement warned the new sanctions 'will only increase the extremist elements within the Gaza Strip and hatred towards Israel.'