In December and again in January he prohibited all imports into Gaza save for food and medicine but including cooking fuel and gas. The political purpose is to squeeze the PA so hard that it will desist from 'violence', which is how Israel describes the uprising. But you don't need the fine print to witness this thoroughly planned impoverishment, this wholly political economy. You need only walk through Gaza's Fras market, where idle Palestinians gather with nothing in their pockets but their hands. One man, who used to work in Israel, barters an old TV set for a sack of flour to feed his 12 children.
Women hock the family silver with gold merchants to get their hands on some ready cash.
There is no cooking gas left in Gaza other than what we have in our homes. But the siege is not simply economic. It is also territorial, and enabled under Oslo through the army's control of Gaza's borders with Egypt and Israel and over the three 'south', 'middle' and 'north' lateral roads that connect the Strip's 17 Israeli settlements to Israel itself. Throughout the uprising, the army has not only 'secured' these bridgeheads but also razed about 1,200 hectares of Palestinian land to expand them in readiness for any future, unilaterally imposed demarcation of Gaza's borders. Prior to the uprising, the junction was just blossoming as a small residential neighbourhood.