Gaza – Small Building Supplies Enter Gaza For The First Time Since Start Of War

Gaza – Small building supplies to repair housing interiors entered Gaza on Thursday for the first time since Operation Protective Edge began on July 8.

Less then two days since the cease fire went into effect glass and ceramic tiles rolled into Gaza from Israel on trucks at the Kerem Shalom Crossing.

It’s expected that cement and iron for housing reconstruction will soon follow, first under the auspices of international organization and after that for the free market, said Ami Shaked, who oversees Kerem Shalom.

The decision to allow cement to enter Gaza, even though it was used in the past to build infiltration tunnels, is part of the Egyptian brokered cease-fire agreement with Hamas.

Located on the Israeli-Gaza border, not far from Egypt, Kerem Shalom is the sole commercial passageway into the Strip.

For the last seven weeks, only humanitarian goods, such as food and medicine entered Gaza through this complex large concrete open-air facility where Israeli and Palestinian workers operated under fire.

Just on Tuesday, the last day of the cease fire, Hamas mortar attacks halted the transfer activity, so that only 75 of the scheduled 217 trucks made it through a back-to-back system where Israeli vehicles drop off goods, that are then loaded onto Palestinian trucks.

On Thursday morning, the crossing burst back into life with school supplies, clothing, shoes and toys.

“This is the first day we opened for everything,” said Shaked.

The large loading areas were stacked with supplies such as large green generators, empty water storage tanks, table and plastic chairs.

Shaked held up a stapled pieces of paper, with a list of goods requested by Gazans, to explain that it is the Palestinians who determine what items are trucked in.

“This list was written by the Palestinian side. They say what they want for today. Every day they supply us this list,” he said.

He cross checks their list, with his list, to make sure that none of the supplies can be used for military purposes.

A portion of the crossing, he said, was recently redesigned to allow for an increased volume of cooking gas.

“We doubled the quantities,” Shaked.

Benzine is too expensive for the Palestinians, so they have redesigned their cars to run on cooking gas, Shaked explained.

Until October Israel allowed in cement and iron for Gaza businesses but that stopped after Israel discovered an infiltration tunnel fortified by cement.

From that point and until the war, the only building items that entered Gaza were under the auspices of international organizations, Shaked said.

He expects that initially within the coming days, cement will again enter Gaza under the supervision of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or the World Food Program.

Plans are being drawn for a monitoring system for cement for housing reconstruction by building companies that will also soon be operational, Shaked said.

But monitoring cement is only some of the issues at hand, said Shaked. His staff is constantly on alert for smuggled items, particularly since Egypt last year closed the tunnels under its Rafah border through which Palestinians use to sneak items into Gaza.

“We are almost the only way for goods to get into Gaza, so they [Palestinians] try daily to smuggle things,” he said.

“We found things that could be useful for the miltiary industry. We e found chemicals that could be used as rocket fuel. We even found a truck of Hamas uniforms. They declared it as uniforms for schools. I would not want to send my son to this school,” Shaked said.

He talks as he strides through the crossing, wearing a blue baseball cap over his gray hair, which is pulled back into a pony tail.

Kerem Shalom, he said, is a place that is both under attack by Palestinians and one where they work together with Israelis, with a common purpose, keeping Gaza supplied.

Hamas destroyed the crossing in 2008, with almost 2.5 tons of TNT, Shaked said.

“We were attacked in 2012 by the Egyptian Jihads. We have been attacked by mortars and rockets from Hamas,” Shaked said.

Unfortunately, he added, he has trained his staff to work under fire, and he is thankful that in the last six years he has held his post, no one has died under his watch.

“There is no trust between the sides,” said Shaked. But his workers and the Gaza contractors on the other side, who technically work for the PA, share the same mission.

“I do not expect compliments from the Palestinians.

It is not part of the deal,” he said.

They know that he has the ability to supply them with what they want and he views as his role to facilitate that, based on government dictates.

His crossing, he said, can handle as many goods as the Palestinians need. Part of the issue here is lack of money to pay for the goods, Shaked said.

The passageway, he said, is focused mostly on one-way traffic. Goods enter, but rarely exit. The initial cease-fire terms do not include plans for that to change. Gazans can still no send their goods to Israel or the Palestinians territories.

When asked by a reporter what what the capacity of the crossing was, Shaked smiled and answered, “Please, challenge me.”