GAZA CITY (AFP) - Merchants across the Gaza Strip closed their shops on Saturday in a half-day strike to protest against Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory, an AFP correspondent said.
The strike, called by the Popular Committee Against the Siege (PCAS), a politically independent group headed by Palestinian parliamentarian Jamal al-Khudari, was to be part of a day of international events and demonstrations.
“Our message is clear, and it is to break the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip and to motivate the Arab and Islamic and international community on the official and popular level,” Khudari told AFP.
The group says it has organised protests and other activities in more than 90 cities across the world and has called on international participants to switch off their lights for 30 minutes after sundown in a show of solidarity.
Hundreds of protesters, including representatives from Hamas and Gaza’s other main political movements, gathered in Gaza City’s Kuteiba Square to lay the cornerstone of a memorial to victims of the blockade.
From there demonstrators marched to the United Nations headquarters where Khudari presented a letter addressed to UN chief Ban Ki-moon on the impact of the blockade.
Israel has sealed the Gaza Strip off from all but vital humanitarian goods since the Islamist Hamas movement — considered a terrorist organisation by Israel and the West — violently seized power last June.
On January 17 Israel completely locked down the territory, causing the Gaza Strip’s sole power plant to shut down for lack of fuel. It resumed shipments of food, medicine, and fuel five days later.
Israel has said the closures are aimed at putting pressure on the Hamas-run government in Gaza to end near-daily rocket and mortar attacks by militants against southern Israeli towns and military positions.
On Saturday Khaled al-Batsh, the spokesman for the radical Islamic Jihad group which has claimed many of the rocket attacks, joined in the protests against the blockade, which he called “immoral and inhuman.”
Hamas meanwhile vowed to continue armed attacks as spokesman Ismail Radwan warned that “if the siege continues there will be large explosions in the region that will engulf all parties and factions.”
Many international human rights groups have accused Israel of pursuing a policy of collective punishment against Gaza’s 1.5 million residents and also called on militant groups to stop targeting the Jewish state with rockets.
source:news.yahoo