After the Palestinian Authority regulated how much it pays for power to the territory ruled by Hamas, Israel decided to shrink electricity materials to the Gaza Strip on Monday.
In 2007, Hamas snatched control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas’s Fatah movement. Numerous efforts at reconciliation have been unsuccessful. Israel does not interact with Hamas because it is viewed as a terrorist group.
The verdict by Israel’s security cabinet is expected to reduce Gaza’s power supply by forty-five minutes the daily average of four hours of energy. Gaza’s two million residents obtain all their power from an electricity grid that is dependent on Israeli materials, said Israeli officials.
The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority blamed Hamas’s failure to compensate it for electricity for the decrease in power supplies from the Israel Electric Corporation.
Tareq Rashmawi, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority, joined that rationalization with a request that Hamas agree to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s unity proposals, which would allow Hamas to hold parliamentary and presidential elections for the first time in over a decade.
According to Rashmawi, “We renew the call to the Hamas movement and the de facto government there to hand over to us all responsibilities of government institutions in Gaza so that the government can provide its best services to our people in Gaza”.
In addition, Israel and the Palestinian Authority “will bear responsibility for the grave deterioration” in Gaza’s health and ecological condition, declared Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.
Ashraf al-Qidra, spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza, believed that any aggravation to Gaza’s energy predicament, could trigger the breakdown of medical and health services that are dependent on the central electrical plant, full of individual generators; most generators are close to collapse.
Israel charges the Palestinian Authority eleven million U.S. dollars a month for electricity. The money is abstracted from Palestinian tax incomes. However, the Palestinian Authority expressed that it would only pay for seventy percent of the monthly cost of electric power that is derived from Israel to the Gaza Strip.
“This is a decision by (Abbas) … Israelis paying Gaza’s electricity bill is an impossible situation,” said Israeli Public Security Minister, Gilad Erdan.
Even though Hamas might react by increasing aggressions with Israel, Israeli military and security chiefs supported the move.
