When all else fails, crime pays

Today's BBC website carried yet another story of the humanitarian crisis that has resulted from the blockade of Gaza over the past nine months.

It focused on two stories. Both are tragic but both all too common. The first concerned Nael, a young man with terminal cancer. Despite numerous official appeals to the Israeli authorities for a medical visa to leave Gaza for treatment in Egypt, treatment not available in Gaza, Naels application was continually refused and he eventually died in poverty in Gaza age 21 years. His mother left to harbor the resentment alone.

The second concerned another young man, Samir who had been an employee at Abudan as a garment machinist. The factory were he worked, like many others closed through the strangling effects of the blockade. He said he returned to the factory every day just to check if, by some chance, it was working again and he could have his job back.

He took the BBC reporter to his home: a small, dark construction of breeze-block and corrugated iron.

There his wife held the youngest of their five children as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor. Two other toddlers ran around barefooted while they spoke.

He explained how he managed to make a little money by selling bread from a cart he wheeled through the town. It was not enough, he said, to feed his family.

His eyes welled up as he told the reoprter he had not been able to pay his rent for four months but that his landlord had taken pity on him.

There was an alternative, he said, one which he had refused but which nearly half of his former colleagues had taken up.

It was to join a work-force that was still well paid in spite of the troubles everywhere else: that is, the security forces of Hamas.

The pressure being put on Gaza - not just by Israel but the international community and even the Palestinian government in the West Bank, which is run by the Fatah faction - is seen as a means of weakening Hamas, strengthening the moderates and stopping the rocket fire.

But, in fact, the rockets continue to be launched and mothers like Nael's are calling for revenge while working-age men like Samir are accepting Hamas' offer to pick up arms.

It's the same scenario we saw in Northern Ireland where unemployment and financial hardship left the IRA as the only reliable employer.

When will they ever learn?