It's going to take a hell of a lot longer than this post, and I likely won't live to see its completion.
"Gaza starts to rebuild from rubble" by William Booth and Ruth Eglash | Washington Post August 28, 2014
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — An open-ended cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was holding Wednesday after seven weeks of warfare that killed more than 2,200 people.
The Israeli military said early Wednesday there had been no reports of violations since the cease-fire with Gaza went into effect Tuesday evening. The army later said it responded to fire from across the border with Syria after an officer was injured earlier in the day.
They gotta be waging war on someone, 'eh?
In the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, people were out en masse, and electricity crews were trying to restore power and repair transmission lines. Residents in the hardest-hit districts were using shovels and their bare hands to clear paths through the rubble to their homes.
United Nations assessment teams began to do field reporting to match their satellite images of the destruction.
‘‘Gaza had 50 percent unemployment before,’’ said Frode Mauring, special representative of the administrator of the UN Development Program, as he stood in front of a leveled yogurt factory. ‘‘Imagine what it is now.’’
He said the challenge will be not just to return Gaza to its status July 7 before the war began but to open it up to the world.
It's still status quo.
‘‘The root cause’’ of the conflict ‘‘is that Gaza is not a livable place,’’ Mauring said in an interview. ‘‘There’s no trade, no way to build a viable economy.’’ He estimated the strip’s losses at about $4.2 billion.
That's Israeli policy, a sub-subsistence level.
Hamas on Wednesday put its traffic cops back on the streets, where they were joined by what was called military police in green uniforms and red berets carrying rifles.
Ali Musabeh was clearing rubble from his family’s home to make a space in the one room left for them to sleep. He was anxious for the truce to hold.
‘‘A cease-fire is not a victory,’’ he said.
Actually, it is.
Musabeh, like most people in Gaza, quickly learned that the truce deal struck in Cairo on Tuesday was not better for Palestinians than an Egyptian proposal after the first week of the war.
‘‘What good has come of this?’’ asked his mother, Naima Musabeh. ‘‘They’ve destroyed us. We are displaced people. We got nothing from this suffering.’’
After the cease-fire took hold Tuesday evening, Palestinians poured into the streets of the ravaged Gaza Strip to celebrate.
‘‘We have won,’’ Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri exulted at a news conference in front of Shifa Hospital. The Palestinian Islamist group’s fighters accomplished ‘‘what no Arab army has done,’’ he said. ‘‘We have defeated them.’’
In soccer terms, it was a draw and thus a victory for the heavy hamas underdog.
His exuberance aside, officials from Hamas and another Gaza-based militant group, Islamic Jihad, said the cease-fire agreement essentially brings Israel and Palestinians back to terms agreed upon in the truce signed after the 2012 Gaza war.
A senior official in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, speaking about the latest cease-fire on the condition of anonymity, said Hamas had gained little, if anything, from the conflict, which has left vast tracts of Gaza in ruins.
But they did win! They WON WORLD OPINION and exposed Israel for the monsters they are!
‘‘Hamas is now finally accepting a cease-fire proposal that was first proposed by Egypt on July 15,’’ the official said. ‘‘There is nothing more to the proposal than there was a month and a half ago.’’
That is true, the reason being it was the Israeli proposal.
Under the deal, Israel will immediately ease restrictions on Gaza and allow aid and construction materials to enter the coastal enclave. The deal will also allow Gaza fishermen to venture 6 miles offshore; until now, they were restricted to 3 miles.
Hasn't really happened, they have harassed fisherman since, none of it makes print because once the "war" is over the propaganda pre$$ moves onto the next item on the agenda.
Other demands by the Palestinians — building a seaport and an airport, opening all border crossings, and improving the movement of goods and people — are set to be discussed in Cairo.
The world demands it even if my Israeli government handout posing as a paper ignores it.
Israel also will press its demand that Gaza be demilitarized.
I want murderous Israel demilitarized, which makes me an anti-Semite but.... wait a minute. Palestinian Arabs are semites, too.
US Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed the deal and urged the two sides to ‘‘fully and completely comply with its terms.’’
I'm sure he means well and has been caught in some off the cuff flaps exposing a deeply-buried humanity that exists in the man (think there is still good in him), but within the larger context we shall see (from those that follow it the last week has been filled with Israeli violations and provocations).
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So how long is it going to take?
"Rebuilding Gaza could take 20 years, group says" by Peter Enav | Associated Press August 31, 2014
JERUSALEM — An international organization involved in assessing post-conflict reconstruction says it will take 20 years under current levels of restrictions to rebuild the Gaza Strip’s battered and neglected housing stock following the war between Hamas and Israel.
:-(
Most of the new building would make up for a preexisting housing deficit, rather than to address damage from fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants.
Meanwhile, appearing in a round of postwar interviews on Israeli TV channels, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel was not ready to return to the negotiating table with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas unless he distances himself from Hamas militants.
Hamas and Abbas’s Palestinian Authority have formed a unity government in Gaza, which has been previously condemned by Netanyahu.
Abbas did as demanded and dissolved it.
Also Saturday, new clashes erupted between Al Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels and UN peacekeepers in the Golan Heights after the militants surrounded their encampment, activists and officials said.
Syrian rebel groups, including the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, overran the Quneitra crossing — on the frontier between Syrian- and Israeli-controlled parts of the Golan Heights — on Wednesday, seizing 44 Fijian peacekeepers. The Nusra Front also surrounded the nearby Rwihana and Breiqa encampments, where other UN peacekeepers are holed up.
They are now the "moderate" Syrian rebels in light of ISIS.
The Philippine military chief said early Sunday that more than 70 Filipino peacekeepers had escaped from the encampments. General Gregorio Pio Catapang said the Filipinos had to return fire in self-defense before managing to escape after a seven-hour siege.
Starting to smell like a psyop.
The Gaza housing assessment by Shelter Cluster, chaired by the Norwegian Refugee Council with the participation of the UN refugee agency and the Red Cross, underscores the complexities involved in an overall reconstruction program for the Gaza Strip, which some Palestinian officials have estimated could cost in excess of $6 billion.
It is based on the current level of goods permitted to be moved from Israel to Gaza — a level that could easily be expanded, which would shorten the time needed to address the territory’s housing needs.
Any effort to rebuild Gaza will be hindered by a blockade imposed by Egypt and Israel since the Islamic militant group Hamas assumed power in 2007. Israel has severely restricted the import of concrete and other building materials into Gaza, fearing that militants will use them to build rockets and reinforce cross-border attack tunnels.
Egypt and Norway have raised the possibility of convening a Gaza donors’ conference at some point next month.
Those never go anywhere, but just talking about it is stunning.
With a population of 1.8 million, Gaza is a densely populated coastal strip of urban warrens and agricultural land that bears the scars of previous rounds of fighting.
In its report issued late Friday, Shelter Cluster said 17,000 Gaza housing units were destroyed or severely damaged during this summer’s war and 5,000 units still need work after damage sustained in the previous military campaigns. In addition, it says, Gaza has a housing deficit of 75,000 units.
Shelter Cluster said its 20-year assessment is based on the capacity of the main Gaza cargo crossing to handle 100 trucks of construction materials daily. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli agency responsible for operating the crossing on whether it would ease restrictions.
They haven't eased a thing, and no word in my paper.
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"Hamas aide weighs possible negotiations with Israel" by Jodi Rudoren and Fares Akram | New York Times September 12, 2014
JERUSALEM — With no clear plan in place to continue Egyptian-brokered talks that halted this summer’s hostilities between Israel and Hamas, the militant Palestinian movement that dominates the Gaza Strip, a senior Hamas leader said in an interview broadcast Thursday that the group might have to reverse its longstanding ban on direct negotiations with Israel.
Abbas's standing that bad?
The leader, Mousa Abu Marzook, told Al-Quds Television that Islamic law did not bar such talks and that they could be necessary if no other route yielded progress on reconstructing thousands of buildings demolished across Gaza. The comments, along with Hamas’s partial payment of salaries Thursday to employees of its former Gaza government, highlighted increasing tension threatening the recent reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, the rival faction led by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
That's already dissolved in my mind.
“As we negotiate with weapons, we can negotiate with words,” Marzook said, stumbling as he tried to address the anchor’s question about the possibility of direct talks with Israel. “If the status quo remains, and I say it very frankly because it has become kind of a public demand by all the people in the Gaza Strip, Hamas may find itself compelled to this behavior.”
WTF? A government that listens to its people?
Hinting that the Palestinian government created by the reconciliation had failed to deliver anything for Gaza residents, he added: “The issues that were sort of taboo policies become on the agenda.”
They were never allowed to deliver anything. Soon after the unity government the teens were killed (odd timing, cui bono) and Israel began the war.
The Hamas politburo released a statement after the interview aired saying that “direct negotiations with the Zionist enemy are not of the movement’s policies and are not in the discussions.”
Israel has its own ban on talks with Hamas, unless the movement accepts three conditions: renouncing violence, recognizing Israel, and embracing previous agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Okay, so when is Israel going to renounce violence, recognize Palestine (never have, just keep taking land), and fulfill their obligations that they never do!?
“As long as Hamas does not abandon the path of violence and terrorism, Israel will not conduct direct negotiations with that terrorist organization,” Yaakov Peri, a senior Israeli minister, said Thursday on Israel Radio.
But Marzook’s comments might have been less about a practical policy change than a political shot at Abbas, whose harsh criticism of Hamas over the weekend renewed doubts about the durability of the reconciliation pact signed in April.
If nothing else, Israel destroyed the unity government that was pressuring them to negotiate.
A Fatah leader close to Abbas led the Palestinian delegation in Cairo that accepted a cease-fire with Israel on Aug. 26, promising to open crossings into Gaza, which has yet to produce results on the ground.
And this is the last article in my Globe that has covered the issue. I went back and checked all last week and my notes.
Those talks are supposed to resume this month to discuss reconstruction as well as Palestinian demands for an airport and seaport in Gaza. But many in Hamas now question whether such a delegation can deliver those results.
One of Hamas’s main goals in the reconciliation was to secure payment of salaries for more than 40,000 people who had staffed ministries in Gaza since 2007, when Hamas, which won elections the previous year and formed a unity government with Fatah, routed its rival from Gaza.
Oh, excuse me? The seized nothing then! And the route was because of a coup attempt by Fatah, but I tire of repeating myself.
But the Palestinian Authority, which in the intervening years continued to pay salaries for 70,000 employees of its own in Gaza, maintains that it cannot send money to anyone affiliated with Hamas, for fear of risking financial support from countries like the United States that consider Hamas a terrorist group.
So Hamas, which has already distributed $40 million to families whose homes were attacked by Israel, on Thursday provided $275 to $1,240 to each of its employees in what officials described as a loan. Hamas, which was suffering financially this spring, has refused to say where the money originated.
Employees who had not been paid for months lined up outside the Islamic National Bank in Gaza City, where three money-changers were on hand to exchange the payments in dollars to shekels, the Israeli currency used in Gaza.
Give me control of a nation's currency and I care not what is their government.
Jehad Bahrawi, a driver in the prison ministry, got three $100 bills, about half his monthly salary.
“I’m not going to buy school uniforms or book bags for my kids,” said Bahrawi, 44, a father of seven whose home in the Shejaiya neighborhood was damaged but not destroyed. “I will pay for the supermarket and other debts and nothing will remain.”
I can $ympathize with that.
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If only Gaza could be rebuilt in less than an hour.
That's one reason I oppose all wars. It always takes longer to build than destroy. Why is that, and why do certain powers focus and excel at the latter much more than the former?
