The Gaza Strip's sole power station shuddered to a halt Sunday, leaving residents without current for long periods and endangering the lives of hospital patients, officials said.
The Gaza Strip's sole power station shuddered to a halt Sunday, leaving
residents without current for long periods and endangering the lives of
hospital patients, officials said.
Just 48 hours after some 450,000 liters of fuel were delivered to the coastal
strip from
Israel
on
Friday, the Gaza Power Authority said its tanks had run dry.
Consumers were being rationed to eight hours of power supply a day, local
residents said.
"The generating station in
Gaza
City
was
stopped completely this morning after two days of working," the authority
said in a statement, calling on "all parties to take immediate measures to
solve the fuel crisis completely and permanently."
Bassem Naim, health minister in
Gaza
's
Hamas-run government, said the fuel shortage was placing lives in jeopardy.
"Fifty percent of our ambulances and vehicles are immobilized," he
said in a statement. "We are under constant strain from power cuts."
He said that in one case a hospital operating theater had its power cut during
an operation.
"This is threatening the lives of thousands of sick people," he said.
Israeli officials say that the fuel crisis is an internal Palestinian matter
and that if the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority places and pays for
another
Gaza
fuel
order,
Israel
will
facilitate it.
"
Israel
has
never prevented the transfer of fuel and will not do so in the future,"
Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli military department in charge of
coordinating tightly-controlled access between
Israel
and
Gaza
.
Friday's delivery was made after Egyptian officials reached an agreement with
Israel
to
permit the transfer of fuel to enable the
Gaza
power
plant to function.
An Egyptian official told AFP that the arrangement had been for the delivery of
900,000 liters of fuel. It was not clear when the remainder might be delivered.
The
Gaza
plant
supplies nearly a third of
Gaza
's
electricity, with the rest coming from privately-operated generators. The plant
last stopped generating power on March 10, for the third time in four weeks,
causing power cuts of up to 18 hours per day, according to the UN humanitarian
agency, OCHA.
Gaza
has long suffered outages because of shortages at
its power plant, which has a maximum capacity of 140 megawatts but for some
years has been able to generate only around half of that when operational.
In recent months, the situation has worsened because of a shortage of fuel,
most of which is smuggled through cross-border tunnels from
Egypt
.
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