US-Israel with the help of Hosni Mubarak offered Hamas only one way out. Subordinate to Fatah, relinquish power in Gaza and hand the border crossings back to the Western-backed secularist and corrupt Fatah lead by Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas refused. It seems, to the great dismay of Tel-Aviv-Washington, the regime change in Cairo could slowly be turning into another Israel’s imaginery threat to its existence. The military junta’s first anti-Semitic action was to force Mahmoud Abbas to make peace with the democratically elected Islamic Resistance Hamas, currently ruling Gaza.
Today, Cairo partially opened the Rafah border-crossing to the beseiged 1.5 million native Muslims and Christians inside tiny Gaza ghetto. Now, Women would be able to leave Gaza without restrictions, while men between the ages of 18 and 40 would have to obtain visas for Egypt at the border. However, the old restriction on transfer of goods across the crossing will remain in force.
The lifting of the four-year-old blockade at Rafah border-crossing, though, will not allow Hamas to receive Iranian missile but certainly means a blow to the US-Israeli international isolation of 1.5 million Gaza inhabitants. Now, Zionist-regime will be left with its siege on its own border with Gaza. Israel currently maintains the only border crossing that allows goods to cross. And once Cairo decides to remove even this restriction – the US-Israeli policy towards Islamic Resistance and Palestinian will go down the drain serving none of Zionist agenda.
The Zionist-regime with the help of its poodles in western world governments has long been spreading lies for inforcing its naval and ground blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on the fear of Hamas receiving arms from Iran via Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. Israel’s blockade was never meant for the political defeat of Hamas but to turn Gazan genocide into profit.
The Gaza Strip is the most aid-dependent area in the world. Without the ability to export and to import raw materials, without the needed infrastructure for local industry, the Gaza Strip is unable to generate sufficient local income to sustain its population and must depend on aid. The Israeli siege thus creates the conditions for large amounts of aid to be sent to Gaza.
This aid must pass through Israeli ports and airports, with customs,storage fees, and transport fees ending up in the coffers of Israeli companies. The limitations set by Israel on the number of trucks allowed to enter Gaza and the prolonged checks the goods must go through increase the transportation and storage costs dramatically.
Much of the aid comes in the form of products – food, animal feed, petrol, cooking gas, medicine, etc. – procured from Israeli companies. These companies have thus been able to find a captive market in Gaza, get paid up-front (because checks from banks in the Gaza Strip aren’t accepted in Israel), and increase their sales. Most importantly, this aid is funded with foreign currency, but the goods come from Israeli companies which must be paid in Israeli currency. The result is that massive amounts of foreign currency are converted at the Central Bank of Israel into Israeli shekels in order to fund aid, and the Central Bank of Israel gets to keep the foreign currency. In effect, the Israeli siege of Gaza has transformed the aid industry into one of Israel’s biggest exports – companies that would normally provide domestic services have become sources for foreign currency, which contributes to Israel’s overall economic strength and has already eliminated Israel’s trade deficit almost entirely.
