Gazans are enduring 18-hour-a-day blackouts, fuel is running low for hospital backup generators, raw sewage pours into the Mediterranean Sea for lack of treatment pumps and gas stations have shut down. Ostensibly the spat revolves around fuel supplies from Egypt ? but on a broader level, it is linked to Egypt's troubled relationship with Hamas and its long-standing deep ambivalence toward Gaza itself. Egypt refuses, wishing to keep Gaza at arms' length, and to avoid absolving Israel from continuing responsibility for the crowded, impoverished slice of Mediterranean coast. Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, after a 38-year military occupation, but still controls access by air and sea ? and, except for the several mile (kilometer) long border with Egypt, by land. After the Hamas takeover, Israel and Egypt imposed a border blockade on Gaza to try to dislodge the new rulers. Since the fall of Egypt's pro-Western President Hosni Mubarak last year, Cairo has eased restrictions on passenger traffic but has refused to open a cargo route. The Gaza Cabinet ordered some 1,800 civil servants with government-issue cars to start picking up hitchhikers. "The storage in Gaza is zero and within 48 hours, we will see a real disaster in terms of health, water and transportation," said Amjad Shawa, who heads a network of Gaza civic groups. Over the past decade, Israel has enforced strict travel restrictions between the two, raising Arab concerns that it wants to "unload" Gaza onto Egypt and limit any future Palestinian state to a part of the West Bank.
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