tiny corner of your business,” says al-Assar, who says he’s
been shut down more times than he can remember. “How
much concrete, where it’s going, the license number of the
truck, the driver—on and on and on.”
Israel contends the restrictions are needed to rein in mili-
tants affiliated with Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since
elections in 2006. After the vote, most of the international
community cut off aid to Gaza, and Israel moved to isolate the
territory, including a ban on sales of cement. Hamas, which
long advocated the destruction of Israel, is widely known to
have constructed a concrete-lined labyrinth beneath Gaza to
store munitions and provide shelter for its fighters. And it built
some 30 tunnels—also concrete—into Israel. On six occasions,
armed men managed to get under the border and have killed
24 Israeli soldiers and kidnapped three others. Israel says
Gaza militants have used metal, fertilizer, and even everyday
household items such as ammonia and sugar to build home-
made rockets that they launch at Israeli towns and cities. After
militants murdered a trio of Israeli teenagers in 2014, Israel
launched what it calls “Operation Protective Edge,” the third
such conflict in a half-dozen years. “There is no more just war
than this one,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as
the bombs fell in the summer of 2014. “We will not complete
the operation without neutralizing the tunnels, the sole pur-
pose of which is the destruction of our civilians and the kill-
ing of our children.”Gaza’s 1.9 million r esidents long had a standard of living
higher than in Palestinian areas of the West Bank. In the 1980s
and ’90s, many Gazans commuted daily into Israel for work,
and Palestinians abroad invested in projects aimed at making
the territory’s wide, sandy beaches a tourist destination. The
framers of the 1994 Oslo Accord even envisioned the 25-mile-
long sliver of land along the Mediterranean as a Hong Kong or
Singapore of the Middle East. But around 2000, after the start
of the Second Intifada—the Palestinian uprising punctuated by
a wave of suicide bombings in Israel—the Israelis began cut-
ting off access to Gaza.
The economy has been in a tailspin since 2013, when
Egypt started shutting down the 1,000-plus tunnels used to
smuggle everything from cigarettes and chocolate to cars
and cement into Gaza. In recent months, the situation has
deteriorated as tensions between Hamas and the Palestinian
Authority, combined with continuing disagreements with
Israel, have sharply curtailed money transfers into the ter-
ritory. The roads are potholed and rutted. The wastewater
plant is overloaded, so it often dumps raw sewage into the
waters along the beach. The number of Palestinians depen-
dent on food aid from the UN has increased to almost 1mil-
lion, from about 80,000 in 2000. Unemployment stands
above 50%, and among young people it’s almost 70%. At“Israel has monopolized the
reconstruction”