Gaza Is In A World Of Hurt

Egypt is cracking down on Gaza:

… Egypt cracked down on the smuggling tunnels along Gaza’s southern border. The tunnels secured nearly 70 percent of Gazans’ commercial needs, including construction materials, as well as cheap Egyptian fuel that powered everything from generators to wastewater treatment plants.

While life here has been hard for years, there has been a distinct deterioration in recent months. Electricity is down to eight hours a day or less; prices have spiked; the streets have been flooded with sewage on multiple occasions; and unemployment has shot up to 43 percent, up from 23 percent in the first half of 2013.

They have brought it on themselves:

The deterioration comes as Hamas finds itself increasingly squeezed between Israel and Egypt, both of which have been hit hard by terrorist groups operating in the Sinai peninsula and in recent months have improved military cooperation to tackle the mutual threat. As both countries crack down on terrorist links between Hamas-run Gaza and Sinai, frustration with the increasingly poor conditions in this crowded coastal territory could boil over, presenting an additional threat both to Hamas and its neighbors.

And the hard hits?

Over the past week, there has been an escalation of rocket fire between Gaza and Israel, with a Katyusha attack on the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon last week prompting an Israeli strike on Islamic Jihad operative Ahmad Saad. Hamas is reportedly deploying troops to the Israel-Gaza border to prevent rocket attacks by other factions in the Strip, but that may not be enough to cork the bottled-up frustration. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Hamas today that Israel would respond forcefully if the spate of rocket attacks did not cease.

“Will [the situation] blow up?” asks Harel. “I think we already see the signs that this is where it’s heading. It’s no longer a drizzle of one rocket per day.”

It’s not just causing tensions with Israel, though. It is also putting significant pressure on the Hamas government. Seven years after violently ousting its secular Fatah rivals from the Gaza Strip, Hamas is finding itself in a much weaker position in reconciliation talks.

“Anger with Hamas is boiling, which is basically causing Hamas to rethink its current policy toward Palestinians,” says Mukhaimer Abu Saada, professor of political science at Gaza’s Al Azhar University.

That is not the only hitting going on. Al-Qaida-inspired Egyptian group claims rocket attack on Eilat. And that was a day ago.

Gazans fired three rockets at the Eshkol region early on Tuesday morning. The projectiles slammed into open fields and failed to cause injury or damage.

Hours earlier, terrorists detonated a bomb on the border between southern Gaza and Israel. IDF sources said the explosive was planted on the Gazan side of the fence, and was an attempt to kill soldiers.

The attack did not cause injuries.

“Palestinian terrorists are exploiting the area west of the border to attack soldiers and Israeli civilians,” an army spokeswoman said. “The IDF takes a grave view of this.”

Also on Tuesday, two rockets fired from Sinai at Eilat a day earlier were recovered by the military. A police spokesman said remains of a rocket were found in a desert area outside the Red Sea port. Residents of the city had heard both explosions.

An al-Qaida-inspired group in Egypt claimed responsibility on Tuesday for the attacks, saying it would continue to target the Jewish state while battling the interim military government in Cairo.

So another Middle East War may be in the offing. Dang. The current line up would be Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt against the forces supported by al-Qaida and Iran. So who funds al-Qaida? Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Curious. But the Arab politics of the Middle East has never made much sense to outside observers.

William Burroughs on Islam Inc.

A rout of Mullahs and Muftis and Musseins and Caids and Glaouis and Sheiks and Sultans and Holy Men and representatives of every conceivable Arab party make up the rank and file and attend the actual meetings from which the higher ups prudently abstain. Though the delegates are carefully searched at the door, these gatherings invariably culminate in riots. Speakers are often doused with gasoline and burned to death, or some uncouth desert Sheik opens up on his opponents with a machine gun he had concealed in the belly of a pet sheep. Nationalist martyrs with grenades up the ass mingle with the assembled conferents and suddenly explode, occasioning heavy casualties…. And there was the occasion when President Ra threw the British Prime Minister to the ground and forcibly sodomized him, the spectacle being televised to the entire Arab World. Wild yipes of joy were heard in Stockholm. Interzone has an ordinance forbidding a meeting of Islam Inc. within five miles of the city limits.

And Burroughs wrote that around 1950. Nothing has changed.