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Gaza City: Gaza's 1.4 million Palestinians, already largely confined to their narrow strip of land by Israeli and Egyptian border closures, face a new travel restriction: The Hamas administration has run out of passports.
The rival Western-backed Palestinian government in the West Bank has suddenly stopped sending the documents to Gaza. The official explanation is that passport paper hasn't arrived from specialist printers in France. But passports are still being issued in the West Bank, and few doubt that the real reason is to punish Gaza's rulers - although it is ordinary Gazans who will suffer.
The document debacle is just the latest dispute in the bitter rivalry between the hardline Hamas, which seized Gaza by force last summer, and moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose supporters there were routed in savage fighting.
The few Palestinians Israel and Egypt allow to leave Gaza across their borders will now have an even harder time reaching the outside world as their rival governments compete for dominance.
"People are ... gambling with our future," said Yakoub Salman, a 44-year-old resort manager who is waiting to leave Gaza to return to his job in a Gulf country.
Sealed borders
Salman's passport expires in November and the Gulf state demands that applicants for a work visa hold passports valid for at least a year. Salman hoped to renew his passport and leave Gaza across its border with Egypt during the upcoming fasting month of Ramadan, when Palestinians expect Cairo to temporarily open the frontier as a goodwill gesture.
Gaza's borders have been largely sealed since Hamas seized control of the area in June 2007. But a trickle of people are still allowed to leave for medical care, jobs abroad and for the annual Haj to Saudi Arabia. The Hamas-run Gaza Interior Ministry says about 10,000 Gazans apply for passports each month, and about 3,000 urgent cases are pending.
Following Hamas' Gaza takeover, Abbas severed relations with Hamas, but the two governments had worked together, albeit frostily, to supply passports and other basic services.
In March, however, Hamas banned the practice of Gaza residents applying for passports by mail from the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank, saying only Hamas should issue the West Bank-provided documents to Gazans.
Last month, Abbas' government halted its regular monthly shipment of passports to Gaza, saying supplies had run out.
Under interim peace accords with Israel, Abbas' government is the internationally recognised authority in charge of issuing Palestinian travel documents.
Yousuf Harb of the Palestinian Interior Ministry said the Abbas government is simply waiting for a new shipment of passport blanks from printers in France. However, West Bank passport offices continue to issue documents.
A senior Palestinian National Authority official, speaking on condition of anonymity because his comments had not been publicly acknowledged as official policy, said the passport bottleneck was meant to pressure Hamas into reinstating Abbas loyalists who were fired from the Interior Ministry in Gaza last year.
Riad Malki, spokesman for the Palestinian National Authority, said that passport applicants would have to cooperate with the West Bank government based in Ramallah. The West Bank and Gaza are geographically separate entities located on opposite sides of Israel and, with the Hamas ban on postal applications, Gazans were in a frustrating impasse.
Dirty political game
"We are victims of a dirty political game," said Salman, sitting at a Gaza city travel agent office on a recent day.
"I can't get to Ramallah to renew my passport."
Ahiad Hamada, head of the Hamas-run Gaza passport department in Gaza, accused the Abbas government of abetting the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
"This subject must be solved immediately," he said. "We must regularise this matter and help thousands of people who need to have their passports." In poverty-stricken Gaza, there is no queue of people waiting to leave on foreign vacations and international business travel is rare.
Most aspiring travellers are students with places at foreign colleges, migrant workers like Salman, or people seeking medical procedures unavailable at home, where advanced equipment and medications are in short supply.
Abu Ramadan, a 55-year-old man from the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, says he needs open-heart surgery abroad.
"I don't care who will stamp my passport, a minister in Gaza or the president in Ramallah," he said. "Both are using us as tools in their internal conflicts ... I wish that an earthquake would come and take both sides from our life."
I don't care who will stamp my passport, a minister in Gaza or the president in Ramallah. Both are using us as tools in their internal conflicts ... I wish that an earthquake would come and take both sides from our life."
Abu Ramadan
Khan Younis resident
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