Tag Archives: Education

Gaza Unlocked: Electricity

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Gaza Unlocked Issues: Electricity — American Friends Service Committee

Gaza’s power system is at risk of collapse. In 2006, the Israeli military bombed Gaza’s only power plant, destroying its six transformers. Under the blockade, the power plant can’t import parts to replace damaged components. Temporary fixes have allowed the plant to function at a minimal level, but those solutions were never made to last.

Other factors have exacerbated the power crisis, including a halt in smuggled fuel from Egypt in 2013, the destruction of fuel storage tanks and other structures at the plant by Israeli airstrikes in 2014, and the destruction of infrastructure and distribution networks throughout Gaza. Since April 2017, the Gaza power plant has been offline due to limited fuel imports, further limiting electricity in Gaza.

While Gaza’s electrical grid is linked with the Israeli system, Israel limits how much power it sells to Gaza, and existing power lines can only supply a fraction of Gaza’s total needs.

Today, less than one-third of Gaza’s electricity demand is being met. Rolling blackouts leave Palestinians in Gaza with less than four hours of electricity per day—affecting the health and well-being of residents; jeopardizing critical services, such as hospitals, schools, and water sanitation; and making it impossible for businesses to function.

Ending the blockade is crucial to address the power crisis, but it will not improve the situation immediately. Even if new parts could be imported and additional infrastructure could be built, it would take up to five years for the system to reach a point where current needs could be met.

People in Gaza have no more than 4 hours of electricity per day.

Why Gaza can't count on electricity

 Download our fact sheet

Quick Facts

  • The Gaza power plant operates at less than one-third of its capacity and has regularly had to shut down, due to fuel shortages, caused by fuel costs and Israeli limitations on importing fuel.

  • Because of the limited power supply, over 70 percent of Gaza households have access to piped water for only six to eight hours once every two to four days.

  • Since 2010, at least 29 people—24 of them children—have died in Gaza from fires or suffocation directly linked to power outages.

  • Water is piped to over 70 percent of Gaza households only once every two to four days for four to six hours at a time. That’s because the insufficient power supply can’t provide uninterrupted access to water. And if homes don’t have power during those periods to operate household pumps used to fill cisterns, then they will receive no water.

  • Hospitals provide only limited services because they rely on generators, which produce insufficient electrical supplies that can damage sensitive medical equipment.

  • Schools often run without electricity, leaving students in the dark and making many educational activities impossible.

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Help Us Respond to Gaza’s Electricity Crisis

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Gaza Lights for Rafah Campaign

The electricity crisis in Gaza has reached unprecedented heights, with power now reduced to 2 to 4 hours per day (see Desperate Palestinians Try to Beat Heat and Israeli Blockade Bringing Gaza to Collapse). It is causing terrible suffering for ordinary people there.

Without electricity sewage goes untreated into the sea. Water doesn’t get pumped to high rise apartments or rural areas. Everything has to be done in the dark — cooking, eating, caring for babies and those who are sick or old. Food rots in refrigerators. No fans cool the stifling Gaza summer heat. Children can’t read, and students can’t study. Candles have caused death and injury in tragic house fires. Hospital and home health equipment can’t function.

While only an end to the Israeli occupation and blockade can provide a lasting solution, in the meantime you can help us ameliorate the suffering of poor families in Rafah.

Madison-Rafah Sister City Project is once again partnering with the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) to provide families in Rafah with a “Gaza Lights” unit — a rechargeable household system created by a team of volunteer Gaza engineers that takes advantage of the short hours of electrical service to charge a battery, which can then power lights, fans and phones for twelve hours.

These “Gaza Lights” systems will be produced quickly in Gaza and distributed to needy families by MECA and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.


Amal and the Sketch Engineering Team assemble Gaza Lights systems

MRSCP has committed funds to buy 10 of these systems. We need to raise $3,640 to purchase & install 40 more by the end of November. Please help us reach this goal! Your contribution of just $11 will give one family in Rafah 3 lights for their home. $20 buys them a fan; $31 a rechargeable battery; $91 a complete system.

$2,150 of $4,700 46%

To contribute to this campaign, send a check made out to “MRSCP” and marked “Gaza Lights” to

    MRSCP
    P.O. Box 5214
    Madison WI 53705

You can also contribute online at MECA’s site Gaza Lights for Rafah.

Your contribution to this campaign is tax-deductible; if you contribute online, you will receive a receipt from MECA. If you send a check to MRSCP, we will provide you a receipt at the end of the year.

More
• Gaza Lights Campaign

Gaza Lights Campaign

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The electricity shortage impacts every family in Gaza. Please support the Gaza Lights Campaign!


 
It’s been 10 years of living under siege in Gaza. Three years after the most brutal Israeli assault. And things keep getting worse.

    Gaza now gets only about 2 hours of electricity each day.

Without electricity sewage goes untreated into the sea. Water doesn’t get pumped to high rise apartments or rural areas.

Everything has to be done in the dark — cooking, eating, caring for babies and those who are sick or old. Food rots in refrigerators. No fans cool the stifling Gaza summer. Children can’t read, and students can’t study. Candles have caused death and injury in tragic house fires. Hospital and home health equipment can’t function.

Recently a team of volunteer Gaza engineers designed a rechargeable, battery-operated system that can power lights, fans, and phones for twelve hours. While the only solution to this crisis is to end the Israeli/Egyptian blockade of Gaza and restore electrical power, in the meantime you can help people in Gaza survive.

The “Gaza Lights” systems will be produced quickly in Gaza and distributed to needy families by the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.

    Your contribution of just $11 will give one family in Gaza 3 lights for their home. $20 buys them a fan, $31 a rechargeable battery, and $91 a complete Gaza Light system.

To make a contribution dedicated to Rafah, send a check to “MRSCP” with the note “Gaza Lights” to

    MRSCP
    P.O. Box 5214
    Madison WI 53705

You can also contribute online at the Middle East Children’s Alliance:

What is it like to live without electricity in Gaza in the summer?

“I talked to my family in Gaza earlier this week and asked them: ‘How do you sleep at night when you don’t have electricity?’ The temperature at night there doesn’t go below 74 degrees Fahrenheit, and humidity is high. My 12-year-old sister answered: ‘We don’t.’

“She explained that even if they try to sleep, open all the windows, drink a lot of water – still, they can’t breathe. If they lie down, they spend hours sweating profusely while listening to the Israeli drones’ intimidating noise outside, with nowhere to go. They prefer to stay awake at night until they can’t resist their eyes closing. Even then, they’re troubled by insomnia, and nightmares. They wake up to find themselves drowned in sweat.

“By the morning, the flaming sun limits their options. One option is to spend the day in the Capital Mall, the only mall in Gaza equipped with internet, air conditioners, private electrical generators and a place to sit down. Or they could go and visit a relative who has a big enough battery to operate a small fan while they speak. They can no longer go and sit by the sea, when the risk of catching diseases from the contaminated water is so high, though others have stopped really caring about getting sick or not. As a friend of mine told me: ‘The sea is 99% polluted, we swim in the 1% that’s left.’

“Their electricity, however, suddenly comes back on for two to three random hours at most each day, and that’s the only time you can turn on the pumps to store a little bit of undrinkable water in the tanks that will run out as soon as you take a shower. It becomes a kind of rush hour, when everyone is desperately running around, trying to cool some purchased mineral water in the freezer, recharge cellphone batteries and radios and flashlights, and sit behind a computer screen to read the news, whose headlines are repetitive and hollow.

“As soon as the electricity goes out, the people are back to the streets, sitting in the shade on the pavements. …”

— Excerpted from “My Family in Gaza Tells Me: We Can’t Breathe”, Muhammad Shehada, Haaretz, July 16, 2017

More on Gaza
• Israel implements illegal cuts to Gaza’s power supply, Charlotte Silver, The Electronic Intifada
• Gaza’s electricity crisis, Al Jazeera
• Gaza: Looming humanitarian catastrophe highlights need to lift Israel’s 10-year illegal blockade, Amnesty International

Atfaluna Society: Help 10 Deaf, Needy Children from Gaza

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We have received an appeal for help from the Atfaluna School for the Deaf in Gaza City. Atfaluna (“Our Children” in Arabic) has for many years been one of the main sources of the beautiful Palestinian crafts, including embroidery, ceramics and wood products, that we market in order to support Palestinian livelihoods.

Atfaluna sells these items both to benefit the craftspeople and to support their school for deaf children.

Due to the continuing (and worsening) crisis in Gaza, the school is facing the possibility of having to close some classrooms. They sent MRSCP the following message:

We are writing to you today in hope that you may be able to support our most urgent school campaign which aims to secure funds for the upcoming academic year 2017/2018 for all 20 of our deaf education classrooms. Our school serves 300 deaf girls and boys from extremely fragile backgrounds and in light of the deteriorating situation in Gaza, Palestine we are struggling to maintain our services for the deaf.

We are working hard to avoid ending our educational services for the deaf children in our care and have therefore setup an online fundraising campaign. We were hoping you would kindly circulate, share, contribute to our appeal for classroom 1A which comprises of 10 deaf girls and boys. The link to our online campaign is

Please consider making a donation to this online campaign. These funds do not go through MRSCP but directly to Atfaluna. We are looking into the possibility of doing some direct fundraising for the school, and will let you know if you could therefore make a tax-deductible contribution through MRSCP, but in the meantime we wanted to circulate this appeal.

Finally, you may want to check out these articles about the current situation in Gaza:

As always, thanks for your support.

Gaza’s Kids Need Your Help

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Rafah Children in the Samira Project at the Rachel Corrie Memorial Library. (Photo: Jeff Bright)

Please Support the Samira Project
for Traumatized Children

The Gaza Strip, one of the poorest and most densely populated places on earth, has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison. For nearly eleven years it has been tightly sealed off by the Israeli/Egyptian siege, which drastically restricts human travel as well as imports and exports. As a result at least 80% of the people live under the poverty line. Unemployment is around 43% while youth unemployment is over 60%. The educational system is overcrowded, unstable and inconsistent. Public services have been weakened more and more, especially psycho-social support and other programs serving mainly women and children. This situation has been made even worse by the continuing conflict between Fatah and Hamas, which means that public employees like teachers often go unpaid.

On top of this policy of imprisonment and siege, the people of Gaza are subjected to frequent Israeli military land and sea attacks, which sometimes turn into full-scale assaults and invasions. In 2014, your US tax dollars helped pay for a 50 day Israeli bombardment of Gaza that killed hundreds of children and severely injured thousands more. Entire families were wiped out, and every child in Gaza knows someone who was killed, injured or made homeless or destitute. The UN estimates that as a result, the number of repeatedly and severely traumatized Gaza children who need psychological support and healing is in the hundreds of thousands.

We’re so excited!

YES! I WANT TO SUPPORT THE
SAMIRA PROJECT FOR TRAUMATIZED CHILDREN!

 

DONE!!!!
4/10/17

#FF0000 Raised $3,600 towards the $3,300 target.

Clip and Mail:

Enclosed is my Samira Project contribution:

_______ $ 50 to help buy art and paper supplies for one month
_______ $250 to employ one of eight teachers for one month
_______ $150 to employ an activities coach or the caretaker for one month
_______ $250 to pay for a field trip for the students
_______ $300 to employ the Project Coordinator or Social Worker for one month
_______ I wish to make a general contribution to the project of $____________.

Children have been affected more than others because every aspect of their lives, especially the education system, has been repeatedly disrupted if not destroyed. Psychologically, the negative impact on children is enormous: nightmares, racing thoughts, nail-biting, panic attacks, uncontrolled urination, violent behavior and hyperactivity are common symptoms. It is estimated that at least 30 percent of all children in Gaza are so severely affected that they require some form of structured psycho-social intervention.

For the second time, the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project (MRSCP) is partnering with the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) and the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice to fund The Samira Project in Rafah, a city and refugee camp at the southern edge of the Gaza strip. The project, organized by the Rafah branch of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC), employs special education teachers and a social worker to provide 150 economically disadvantaged and learning-disabled children age six to twelve and their families with five months of psychosocial support. There are presently no educational institutions in Rafah City for these children, who face psychological issues without support. As a result, their educational level is very low and their drop-out rate is rising.

The Samira Project intervenes to develop the children’s skills and increase their ability to learn (especially reading, writing and mathematics); to support them psychologically and socially and rebuild their confidence; to implement scientific solutions to learning disabilities and reduce violent and disruptive behavior; to train families to better support their children; and to create job opportunities for qualified professionals in this field. Field trips, a children’s library and activities such as theater, music, art and reading will help the staff to understand the children and create a space for the children to express their feelings.

The total cost of this project for the current phase is $15,800. MECA has pledged $10,000, the organizers have secured $500, Rachel Corrie Foundation has pledged $2000, and MRSCP needs to raise $3,300 by April, 2017 so that the project can be fully funded.

Please consider a donation to The Samira Project. Specific items that you can provide, and directions for making your contribution, are listed on the coupon below.

As always, we thank you for your support as we work to mitigate the results of our nation’s disastrous Middle East foreign policy, and ultimately to change that policy toward one that supports peace with justice, equality and human rights for all.

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