Gaza goes dark under Israeli chokehold

Power plant shuts down in collective punishment

GAZA CITY (Agencies)

Gaza's main power plant completely shut down on Sunday, plunging the city into darkness, after Israel closed the borders of the Hamas-controlled territory and blocked fuel supplies, despite warnings of the humanitarian impact.

The closure of the plant, which accounts for 30 percent of the population's needs, was set to sharply worsen power cuts already hitting the impoverished coastal strip.

"We have had to close the power plant for want of fuel," its director Rafiq Mliha told reporters.

"This closure is going to have very serious consequences for residents, but also for the operation of hospitals and water treatment plants," he said.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) warned that the shutdown of the power plant would have "a devastating impact."

"Depriving people of such basics as water is tantamount to depriving them of human dignity," UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness said.

"It is difficult to understand the logic of making hundreds of thousands of people suffer quite needlessly," Gunness said.

The Gaza Strip, where most of the 1.5 million residents depend on aid, remained shut for a third consecutive day as the Israeli cabinet decided to maintain the closure of crossing points amid rising tension.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the crossings into Gaza closed late Thursday, saying the move was aimed at pressuring militants inside to stop firing rockets and mortars into Israel and that it would be reassessed.

A day in the life of a Gazan

For Safiya al-Amarin and her children, Israel's war on Gaza militants has meant hungry days and freezing, restless nights interrupted by gunfire, explosions, and helicopters.

"We have no electricity, no cooking gas. There aren't even any candles because of the blockade and there is no wood to cook food for the children," the middle-aged housewife says.

"I have never seen anything like this," she said.

Life for the Amarin family has not been easy for years.

They rummage through local dump sites, salvaging scrap metal and plastic, but this has become potentially lethal, she says, as many of the untapped dumps lie in the no man's land near the border with Israel.

Today she, her family and extended family, which includes 17 children, inhabit an unfinished three-storey concrete shell of a house in the Zeitun neighborhood on the edge of Gaza City.

The family rises at first light and the children go to school. "We always go to school without having breakfast and we never have lunch money," Safiya's 11-year-old daughter Safaa says.

The older boys and the women head off to rummage through local dumps, salvaging iron and plastic they can later resell. On a good day each of them can make around three dollars (two euros).

They eat twice a day, simple meals of bread and tomatoes, cooked in oil if they can get it. They used to buy packaged biscuits, but not anymore.

Sun down in Gaza

When the sun goes down the house is plunged into darkness, its raw concrete walls frozen in the cold drafts. Seven people sleep in one room.

"We put all the clothes we have on the children, some of them wear six layers. I hold them close to me at night to keep them warm," Safiya says, gesturing to the smallest child, less than a year old.

It is at night -- while Safiya is huddling with her children in the dark confines of her crowded house -- that local militants fire their crude homemade rockets and mortars in the general direction of Israel.

On the ground floor of her building the faces of deceased family members stare down at the sandy, unfinished floor from gaudy martyrdom posters plastered on the otherwise bare grey walls.

The Israeli government has said that they will keep borders closed and hunting militants as long as rockets fall on their towns.

But whatever message Israel is trying to send to the people of Gaza is lost on Safiyah.

"It's not their fault," she says, gesturing to her children. "What do they have to do with the rockets?"