Barred From Israel, Palestinians Fret and Wait : Mideast: ‘We’re in a big prison,’ says a Gaza Strip resident. A Cabinet decision prolongs the exclusion.

The sweet smell of oranges baking under a hot midmorning sun was turning into a stink as Mustafa Shahaiba sat Sunday on the ground next to his truck and waited, and traced his frustration with a finger in the dirt, and fumed.

“I have 60 tons of oranges. All of us, we have maybe 1,000 tons. We have been here since Thursday. Today, they say they will let us in at 7 o’clock. But as you see, it is now 10 o’clock. And until this moment, nothing has happened. They say: ‘Wait.’ And that’s all they say.”

In the dust and racket of the streets of Gaza City, a few miles away from the backed-up delivery trucks at the Israeli border, coffee shops are overflowing with clients. Men of all ages listlessly sip the morning away over a cup of tea or strong coffee. They lean against shop windows and watch the traffic lurch by. They strike up casual conversations over the hood of someone’s car.

“All of us here, we’re in a big prison,” said Yasser Mabhouh, a 22-year-old medical technician student who has not been able to leave Gaza to attend college in the West Bank town of Ramallah since late February. He and about 1,500 other Gaza students have been told that they will never receive permission to resume their studies outside Gaza, “which means we will lose everything we have studied: in my case, two years of my life.”

Since Israel closed the occupied territories after the Feb. 25 massacre of about 30 Palestinians in the West Bank town of Hebron--and tightened the seal last week--there is little but waiting, and quiet nurturing of a growing fury, for the estimated 25,000 Gaza residents who have been prevented from going to work each day in Israel.

Peace talks aimed at reaching a self-rule accord resumed Sunday in Cairo, but in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the focus has shifted away from the distant dream of autonomy. Now, tens of thousands of workers who can buy food just a day at a time wonder only how their families will eat each evening.

On Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet said the closure of the territories, the strictest imposed in more than a year, would be in effect until further notice.

Israel TV reported that there are signs the 1.8 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip could remain substantially sealed off until Israel signs a peace agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization--an event that is not foreseen until at least after the end of the month.

“I have savings for maybe two months,” said Abdelrahim Hassan Hawilli, 36, a construction worker in Israel for 18 years. “After that, what can I say? We will starve, at least. And I say, at least. There will be starvation for everyone.”

For the Gaza Strip, the closure order means economic agony. Unemployment, which was already at 35% when Gazans were commuting to work every day in Israel, has jumped to an estimated 50% since the lock-down.

More alarming for Gaza, which more than most West Bank cities owes its economic livelihood to jobs in Israel, the Israeli Cabinet has authorized the importation of 18,000 foreign workers to take many of the jobs held by Palestinians.

The foreign laborers, 15,000 in the construction industry and 3,000 for agriculture, will receive six-month work permits. New subsidies have been ordered to help recruit Israelis for jobs now held by Palestinians.

The Cabinet did say it will re-evaluate the closure order at its regular meeting next Sunday.

In approving the order, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Israel must begin freeing itself from its dependence on Palestinian labor, “a dependence which forces us to make decisions which endanger the security of civilians.”

The closure order was tightened after eight Israelis died in two Arab terrorist attacks in Israel last week. Over the weekend, a Jerusalem woman was stabbed in the stomach by a man believed to be an Arab, and a young Hamas activist from the Gaza Strip was killed when he tried to attack Israeli soldiers with an ax. The Islamic militant group Hamas has vowed to turn Israelis’ lives “into hell” in the week leading up to Israel’s Independence Day on Thursday.

“The Palestinians have to understand there is a price for attacks on Israelis,” Police Minister Moshe Shahal told the Cabinet on Sunday.

In Gaza, Palestinian leaders see the closure order as a sign of bitter and difficult times to come as they attempt to build new lives under the coming transitional period of self-rule.

“It seems that Israel is serious this time, and if so, it will have a catastrophic effect--the Palestinian economy cannot sustain it,” said Salah Abdel Shafi, director of the Economic Development Group in Gaza.

He said both Israelis and Palestinians have agreed on open economic borders in negotiations under way in Paris.

“This was an Israeli request, to have open borders,” Abdel Shafi said. “So now Israel, either they need a kind of economic disengagement--and in this case we have a right to prevent Israeli commodities from entering our markets--or they must open borders to allow Palestinian workers. Either they marry, or they divorce.”

After the Hebron massacre, an estimated 5,000 workers a day were still able to cross into Israel from the Gaza Strip. But since Thursday, even those permissions have been revoked, and Gaza doctors were complaining Sunday that 16 patients badly in need of chemotherapy and other treatment in Israel were not being permitted to cross the border.

The Palestinian Council of Health said 20 Palestinian doctors from the territories were barred from reaching a hospital on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, though the army announced that it would allow doctors to travel to hospitals in East Jerusalem if they had proper permits from the civil administration.

Produce truckers said their goods, though technically exempt from the closure order, were rotting at the border as Israel refused to allow them through. By late Sunday afternoon, most of the backed-up trucks had crossed.

Palestinian leaders say Israel, if it is going to continue barring Palestinians from work in Israel, must allow immediate relief deliveries and in the long run must allow the Palestinians to forge new economic integration with Egypt and Jordan. Eventually, Palestinians must develop industries and factories of their own, they say.

With more than $2 billion in outside aid expected to flow into Gaza and Jericho during the coming period of self-rule, the construction of new infrastructure will provide some new jobs--perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 in Gaza over the next two years.

But an accord on Palestinian autonomy signed by Israel and the PLO last September carries with it a built-in economic dependence on Israel, Abdel Shafi said.

“The moment we agreed on limited political sovereignty we agreed on limited economic sovereignty,” he said. “I don’t think we are going to solve the unemployment problem in the short term, or even in the medium term.”