JERUSALEM — Much of Gaza City fell into darkness Thursday night after an Israeli blockade, tightened in response to Palestinian hostilities, caused the city’s electricity plant to run critically low on fuel and shut down.
Israel also barred 30 truckloads of relief supplies from entering the Gaza Strip, leaving a U.N. agency without food supplies for needy families that make up half the Palestinian territory’s 1.5 million people.
The partial blackout and the food shortage were the most severe consequences of hostilities that have shattered a 5-month-old cease-fire along Israel’s border with Gaza. With the cease-fire accord due to expire next month, Israel and Hamas, the Islamic group that governs Gaza, appeared to be bracing for another round of fighting.
Hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza City joined a candlelight march, organized by a Hamas-backed group, to protest what they called an Israeli siege.
“This is a crime against innocent civilians,” said Ziad Abu Khousa, 23, who wondered how he and other students at Gaza City’s Islamic University could study for midterm exams without lighting. “Half the population of Gaza are women and children, and they have nothing to do with the fighting.”
Many refugees from the 1948 war over Israel’s creation and their descendants live in shantytowns, and nearly all depend on the United Nations for canned meat, flour, sugar, rice and other staples, delivered from Israel.
Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have renounced the cease- fire. But Hamas has permitted sporadic rocket fire into Israel, and Israeli forces this month have made two brief pinpoint raids into Gaza, killing 10 militants.
As required by the cease-fire deal, Israel in June began easing a blockade it had imposed last year after Hamas forcibly took control of Gaza from Fatah, a more moderate, U.S.-backed Palestinian group.
But Nov. 4, after discovering a cross-border tunnel dug by Gaza militants, Israel shut down commercial crossings where basic goods pass into Gaza. Israeli authorities allowed in a limited amount of fuel Tuesday.
John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency operations in Gaza, said the Defense Ministry had promised late Wednesday that it would allow the 30 truckloads of food and other humanitarian supplies to cross into Gaza on Thursday.
But at midday Thursday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the border crossings to remain closed.
