GAZA CITY — Four days into an Israeli blockade that cut off food and fuel to the Gaza Strip, its people contemplated Monday how long until disaster would hit. One family of 13, shivering in the cold, counted its eight remaining candles. A bakery that feeds thousands had three days’ worth of flour.
Hospital generators with enough fuel for three days and no spare parts powered incubators that kept alive twin boys, born 21/2 months premature, their thin chests heaving.
Israel agreed Monday to allow in a one-time shipment of fuel and medicine today, after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak telephoned Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to appeal on behalf of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. But there was no indication from Israel when it planned to fully lift the blockade, imposed Friday in response to increasing rocket attacks from the Palestinian territory.
The Gaza Strip’s power plant, which supplies electricity to about 500,000 people in Gaza City and elsewhere, ran out of fuel Sunday night and shut down, Palestinians in charge of the electrical system said.
Israel closed the entries into Gaza on Friday to enforce its demand that the armed Hamas movement bring a halt to rocket attacks into Israeli territory.
Between last Tuesday and Friday, more than 150 rockets were fired from Gaza. None caused fatalities. Israeli military operations from last Tuesday to Sunday killed more than 30 people in Gaza, most of them gunmen, Palestinian officials said.
“As far as I’m concerned, Gaza residents will walk, without gas for their cars, because they have a murderous, terrorist regime that doesn’t let people in southern Israel live in peace,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told lawmakers from his Kadima Party earlier Monday.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which distributes food rations to 860,000 Palestinian refugees in Gaza, said Monday that without fuel it would have to suspend operations by Friday. The World Food Programme, whose rations help feed 270,000 other Gaza residents, said it would have to stop distributions by Thursday absent more fuel.
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