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Israel Arrests Dozens of
Hamas Lawmakers and Ministers
Nearly half of the Gaza Strip remains without power following
Israeli air strikes that knocked out a main power station. We go
to Gaza to get a report from Chris McGreal of the London
Guardian.
06/29/06
Democracy Now!
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AMY GOODMAN: For the latest on the current
siege, we go to Gaza. We're joined by Chris McGreal, reporter
for the Guardian of London. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Chris.
CHRIS McGREAL: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what the latest situation is in
Gaza?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, it's quite quiet during the day. Most of
the Israeli action tends to come at night. As you mentioned,
there was the dropping of the leaflets over Beit Hanun and Beit
Lahiya last night, and I was there this morning. Many people are
expecting an Israeli army assault. The tanks and troops are just
the other side of the border, the fence. And Beit Hanun is quite
close to the fence, just a couple of kilometers away, and they
have been subject to numerous Israeli incursions over the years,
and they're fully expecting another one.
The situation in the south, which is where the missing corporal
is believed to be held, has also been relatively quiet. The army
took over, in the early hours of yesterday, the disused
international airport there and has been sitting on the edge of
Rafah and Khan Younis refugee camps, which are strongholds of
Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But we're getting a sense from the
military and from movements, the other side of the fence, that
if this corporal is not found or released by nightfall tonight,
that probably within the next 24 hours the army will step up its
assault on Gaza.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the impact on the Palestinians of the arrests
of all of these lawmakers by Israel in the last day?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, the Israelis are characterizing this as a
legitimate operation to pick up men that they argue are members
of a terrorist organization that have been responsible for
repeated attacks on Israel. But amongst ordinary Palestinians,
there's little doubt in their minds that there are two purposes
to this. One is that, effectively, Israel is taking its own
hostages in return for the missing corporal and that also many
Palestinians think that Israel has taken his capture as a means
to try and dismantle the Hamas government. This may or may not
be the case, but certainly that's a very popular view on the
streets at the moment following the announcement of these
arrests.
AMY GOODMAN: You spoke to the head of the power plant that the
Israeli military bombed?
CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, I did, yesterday. Well, the operations
manager.
AMY GOODMAN: And what's the situation? When will they get power
back?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, power's being -- Israel provides about 40%
of the power in the Gaza Strip. And what's happened at the
moment is that's essentially being redistributed, so each area
is getting power for a few hours today. It’s been on and off a
lot.
The power plant -- and there's only one main power plant run by
the Palestinians -- that provided about 60%. It had six
transformers. They were each hit by a single missile each. And
they are completely destroyed. The operations manager said that
it would take probably three to six months to get back online,
$4 million to $7 million to buy new transformers from Sweden,
which had provided the original ones. And then it would take
some time and actually a lot more money to get them up and
running again. And that's if Israel allows the transformers to
be imported.
The basic sense is that the power plant's completely knocked out
for several months. And now they're looking for ways around how
they keep sufficient amounts of electricity going to keep
everybody happy, particularly to be able to continue to provide
water at least some of the day to the residents of Gaza. There’s
1.4 million people here.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the logic of bombing a power plant in an
effort to rescue a hostage? Israel has been saying that they
expect thousands of Gazan residents to leave as a result of
this. Your sense of this?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, what they’re expecting -- there’s two
separate things. They're expecting people to leave the towns
Beit Hanun and Beit Lahiya after the leaflet drop and ahead of
what looks like a looming Israeli army incursion, at the very
least into Beit Hanun, which is an area quite a lot of Kassam
rockets have fired from into Israel.
The logic behind the attack on the power plant is harder to pin
down. The army has consistently said it’s a legitimate military
objective in getting the missing corporal released, but if you
try and ask them how and for some specifics, they're very vague.
In short, from comments made by the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
and by the army itself in the end, it really boils down to the
idea of pressuring the general Palestinian population, hoping
that it will put pressure on the ordinary -- on the militant
groups that are holding the abducted soldier. Human rights
groups, of course, are saying this amounts to collective
punishment and is therefore illegal under the Geneva Convention.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris McGreal, we’re going to leave it there. I
want to thank you very much for being with us. Reporter from the
London Guardian, speaking to us from Gaza.
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