Sealed Off by Israel, Gaza Reduced to Beggary

First-graders at a Gaza school for the deaf have had to rely on sign language since Israeli import restrictions caused the school to run seriously low on hearing- aid batteries. The isolated strip is also short of antibiotics, fuel and food

By Scott Wilson

The batteries are the size of a button on a man's shirt, small silvery dots that power hearing aids for several hundred Palestinian students taught by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza City.

Now the batteries, marketed by Radio Shack, are all but used up. The few that are left are losing power, turning voices into unintelligible echoes in the ears of Hala Abu Saif's 20 first- grade students.

The Israeli government is increasingly restricting the import into the Gaza Strip of batteries, anesthesia drugs, antibiotics, tobacco, coffee, gasoline, diesel fuel and other basic items, including chocolate and compressed air to make soft drinks.

This punishing seal has reduced Gaza, a territory of almost 1.5 million people, to beggar status, unable to maintain an effective public health system, administer public schools or preserve the traditional pleasures of everyday life by the sea.

"Essentially, it's the ordinary people, caught up in the conflict, paying the price for this political failure," said John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, which serves the majority refugee population. "The humanitarian situation is atrocious, and it is easy to understand why -- 1.2 million Gazans now relying on U.N. food aid, 80,000 people who have lost jobs and the dignity of work. And the list goes on."

But for Gazans, caught between Israel's concrete gun towers and the Mediterranean, the sense of crisis is pervasive as they struggle to keep their homes intact, buy essential food from a shrinking and increasingly expensive stock, and educate their children.

"I hold every man, woman and child in Israel responsible for this," said Geraldine Shawa, 64, the Chicago-born director of the Atfaluna Society. A tall, imposing woman who has lived in Gaza for 36 years, Shawa has watched the fortunes of her pupils squeezed in recent months by what she calls Israel's practice of collective punishment.

On Tuesday, Israeli tanks rolled into the central Gaza city of Khan Younis. Six armed Palestinians from the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant splinter group, and the radical Islamic Jihad organization were killed in fighting. Israeli officials labeled the operation "routine."

"I hold each of them responsible, just as they obviously seem to hold all of us responsible," Shawa said of the Israelis. "If the Israeli government really has the power and the desire to change, well, this is pushing me in exactly the opposite way -- over the edge." An Isolated Collective

Moamen Ayash, a frail, 6-year-old Palestinian boy in navy blue slacks and a pressed dress shirt, walked to the whiteboard at the front of his tidy classroom to work through some simple sign phrases.

Moamen has not had a working hearing aid for three months. Israeli military officials said they had no idea the batteries were not being delivered.

The inability to hear even the faintest sounds, which hearing aids sometimes make possible for the deaf, hinders children such as Moamen from acquiring spoken language.

Because few of the estimated 20,000 Gazans suffering from hearing loss know even rudimentary sign language, the deaf here represent an isolated collective, dependent for funding largely on the kindness of strangers and the proceeds of their own crafts shop.

Their condition resembles in some ways the larger estrangement of Gaza, a fenced-in, chaotic jumble of squalid refugee camps set amid rubble-strewn dunes that might someday be perches for resort hotels overlooking the turquoise sea.

Work is rare. Food is scarce. Gasoline is so hard to come by that Mahmoud al-Khozendar, 49, has hung an effigy of a man in a suit above the empty gas pumps at his station. The sign pinned to the hanging man's chest reads: "The Man in Charge."

Israel delivers electricity to Gaza that provides roughly 60 percent of the territory's energy. An Israeli Supreme Court decision is expected any day on whether the supply can be reduced as punishment for the rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel evacuated in the fall of 2005 after nearly four decades of military occupation.

In the rank, crowded wards of Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, the dispensary is out of 85 essential medicines and close to using up almost 150 others.

Dialysis treatment has been cut back from three to two times a week for even the most critically ill kidney patients, roughly 900 in all. A stack of nearly two dozen blood-cleaning machines gathers dust in a corner, awaiting spare parts that Palestinian doctors say have not been allowed through the border crossings between Gaza and Israel.

"They have turned Gaza into an animal farm -- said one person from Gaza we only are allowed to get what keeps us alive," if you are lucky he said.

Since June, Naim said, more than three dozen Palestinians seeking treatment for cancer and other critical illnesses at Israel's more advanced hospitals were rejected for passage by Israeli security agencies. The Israeli nonprofit group Physicians for Human Rights estimates the number of rejections "in the tens."

According to Naim, at least 29 patients have died since June, including 12-year-old Tamer al- Yazji, who Palestinian health officials said was denied entry into Israel after developing acute complications from encephalitis. Of the patients who approached Physicians for Human Rights for help, seven died before being granted passage to Israel, according to the organization.

"What do you call sending dozens of Gaza patients to a slow death because they are refused treatment?" Naim said. "That's not a humanitarian crisis. That's a War Crime."

Lerner, the Israeli military liaison, said this week that he would contact the International Committee of the Red Cross to make sure hearing-aid batteries would be allowed through the crossings.

A spokeswoman for the Atfaluna Society said none had been received so far.

In the meantime, Gazans improvise. "We've bought 20 tons of coffee from every store here we could find," said Riyadh Haigar, owner of the popular Delice Coffee Shop. "Maybe it'll last a month. Then we close the doors."