By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 15, 2007; A01
 First-graders at a Gaza school for the deaf have had to rely on sign language since Israeli import restrictions caused the school to run seriously low on hearing-aid batteries. The isolated strip is also short of antibiotics, fuel and food. (By Scott Wilson — The Washington Post) |
GAZA CITY — The batteries are the size of a button on a man’s shirt, small silvery dots that power hearing aids for several hundred Palestinian students taught by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza City.
Now the batteries, marketed by Radio Shack, are all but used up. The few that are left are losing power, turning voices into unintelligible echoes in the ears of Hala Abu Saif’s 20 first-grade students.
The Israeli government is increasingly restricting the import into the Gaza Strip of batteries, anesthesia drugs, antibiotics, tobacco, coffee, gasoline, diesel fuel and other basic items, including chocolate and compressed air to make soft drinks.
This punishing seal has reduced Gaza, a territory of almost 1.5 million people, to beggar status, unable to maintain an effective public health system, administer public schools or preserve the traditional pleasures of everyday life by the sea.
“Essentially, it’s the ordinary people, caught up in the conflict, paying the price for this political failure,” said John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, which serves the majority refugee population. “The humanitarian situation is atrocious, and it is easy to understand why — 1.2 million Gazans now relying on U.N. food aid, 80,000 people who have lost jobs and the dignity of work. And the list goes on.”
Middle East Children’s Alliance is collecting donations to send a large medical shipment to Gaza. Click this link to make a special contribution now.