Gaza is under closure again. If, until recently, it seemed to the leaders of Hamas both in Gaza and on the outside that after seven years of a suffocating siege, all their troubles were about to disappear, they are now seeing their world turning against them. Just a few months ago, the members of the organization were speaking rather seriously about how they managed to break through the barriers to receive international legitimacy, and how, very soon, they would be conducting a normal foreign policy, just like all the nations of the world. There were even those who tried to persuade Europe and the United State to remove Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations and to treat its government as the official representative of the people living in the Gaza Strip.
Then the skies came crashing down on them. Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was deposed, and Hamas was pilloried along with him. Egypt’s new regime considers Hamas an enemy. The Egyptian army has launched a far-reaching offensive in the Sinai, and is waging a war of annihilation against the subterranean network of smuggling tunnels in Rafah, which were the main source of food and raw materials for the Gaza Strip. The light they saw at the end of the tunnel just a few months ago went out in a flicker. The markets emptied of goods, gasoline for automobiles has just about run out, and emergency stockpiles of gasoline and diesel fuel are running very low as well. The electricity is turned off every few hours, hospitals report that there is a shortage of drugs, and even cigarettes have vanished from the shops.
