Tuesday, September 16, 2008

How to travel from Gaza?

Actually, this is a million dollar question that has no answer since June 2006, the day when the Israeli soldier Gelat Shaleet was kidnapped through a military operation for the Palestinian resistance. Since that time, getting out of Gaza or getting in had become a sort of a Mission Impossible", perhaps Tom Cruz can assist or even make a movie to show us how it could be possible to do so. For more than 2 years, traveling for Gazaians has become a dream. The only available crossing point to travel is Rafah crossing point which was open only 30 times during the last 2 years. Everybody is stuck in Gaza. Sick people, students, ordinary traveler, and anyone is not allowed to travel unless he/she is very lucky to pass during one of the openings that occur one or two time a month. However, you must have strong reason to travel, taking into account that even if you have strong reason to travel no one can guarantee that you are going to pass. This does not require luck only; you need to go and register your name in the Ministry of Internal affairs first and then wait for your name to appear in their traveling list. After that, I mean if your name is in the list, you need to take the first chance of the opening and go for it, taking into account that in that day there will be thousands of people willing to get the same opportunity. In addition, if you're lucky enough to cross, you still need to be luckier to get the approval of the Egyptians to cross as there are hundreds of incidences where people could pass the Palestinian side and Egyptians returned them back without showing any particular reason. Recently, new requirement had been raised due to the conflict between Ramallah government and Gaza government, it is the passport issue. For more than 6 months before now, no passports documents were sent fro Ramallah. Gaza did not receive its regular share because of the conflict. Therefore, another obstacle had occurred. 1 month ago, president Abbas had announced personally that Ramallah will continue sending passports as usual to Gaza. However, Ramallah government ignored that surprisingly and continued to do so. People in Gaza are of course the main victim of all of this. All human rights centers and associations in and outside Gaza have been and still shouting in the media and even begging everyone to solve all these pending issues but nobody is listening. On the Egyptian side, no one cares about Gaza (on the governmental level of course). Egyptians have announced hundreds of times that they will never fail the people in Gaza or let them dawn. However, all the Egyptians actions were minor and had no effective impacts on people's life in Gaza. For how long the current situation will continue, no one knows or even predicts, and the people in Gaza have nothing to do but waiting for a miracle to happen to end up their suffering.