The Israeli government is de-stabilising Gaza and the Palestinian Authority by closing down its links with the outside world, according to the Palestinian minister in charge of negotiations with them.
Ghassan Khatib said that Israel was making the current situation worse by imposing a closure on Gaza and deliberately slowing vital negotiations.
In the seven weeks after Israel’s departure from Gaza, he said, the Rafah and Erez crossings into Egypt and Israel respectively had been closed most of the time. The number of containers of goods leaving Gaza through the Karni goods crossing had fallen from 50 a day before disengagement to 20 a day afterwards.
The World Bank estimates that the crossing can support 150 containers a day. The restrictions are resulting in an increase in unemployment and poverty in Gaza, which is encouraging extremism.
Khatib’s comments follow a similar warning from James Wolfensohn, the international community’s special envoy, last week, that Israel was ”almost acting as though disengagement had not happened”.
Palestinian officials claim that their Israeli counterparts have cancelled and postponed meetings, citing holidays, absence of colleagues and differences between government ministers. Foreign diplomats have privately agreed that Israel appears to be deliberately dragging its heels.
Mark Regev, a spokesperson for the Israeli foreign ministry, said that Israel had cancelled meetings after security incidents but there was broad agreement on many of the issues, including the Rafah border.
”A healthy Gaza is in our national interests but we cannot ignore the security consideration.”
Since Israel departed from Gaza it has left several important decisions unresolved, including how goods and people would leave and enter Gaza, how Gaza and the West Bank would be connected, and the disposal of the settlement rubble.
On Tuesday the Israeli Cabinet agreed that the Rafah border crossing with Egypt could be opened only for people carrying Palestinian identity cards under the supervision of European Union monitors. Israel also insists that the European officials should act as enforcers. While the Palestinians agree with these measures they reject Israel’s demands that no goods should leave via Rafah and that Israel should be able to monitor the border by video link. ”Israel has no security or customs interest in goods leaving by Rafah. There is no need for Israel to monitor the crossing in real time. It would be like they never left,” said Khatib. ”This is part of an Israeli strategy to narrow space for manoeuvre in the political, economic and security areas.”
Khatib insisted that the failure of negotiations had nothing to do with political opportunism on the part of the Palestinians. ”We have done everything to accommodate Israeli concerns,” he said.
An Israeli missile strike on a car killed two Palestinians in the Jebaliya refugee camp on Tuesday, including Hassan Madhoun, a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. The missiles hit the car only a few minutes after a convoy carrying the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, passed through the area, according to Palestinian security officials. – Guardian Unlimited Â