News / Palestine

Israel cuts mail services to Gaza Strip

Friday, 15 July 2016 8:57 AM [ Last Update: Friday, 15 July 2016 8:57 AM ]

Palestinians hold banners during a demonstration against unemployment and poverty at the Unknown Soldier Square in Gaza City, April 2, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

Israel has choked up mail services to the already-besieged Gaza Strip, claiming that the service has been used to transfer “banned” items into the enclave.

Tel Aviv is halting the service “in light of multiple attempts to smuggle banned items… used for terrorism against Israel,” Yoav Mordechai, who coordinates Israel’s activities in the Palestinian territories, said on Thursday, Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported.

The regime brands the Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas, which administers Gaza and has been defending Gazans against regular Israeli attacks, as a “terrorist” organization.

Israel occupied the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East al-Quds (Jerusalem), and Gaza in 1967.

It later annexed the West Bank and East al-Quds in a move never recognized by the international community. Tel Aviv withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but has been keeping the territory under a crippling siege and regular deadly offensives.

The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli siege since June 2007. The blockade has caused a decline in the standards of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.

Palestinian children play in an impoverished area in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Yunis, May 9, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

The paper cited “security officials” as claiming that, before the decision was made, “drones, scuba diving equipment and weapons components” had been intercepted in Gaza-bound mail.

Israel already closely monitors all Gaza-bound items. The daily cited a Palestinian, identified only as “A.,” as saying, “it was ‘strange’ for Israel to complain of dangerous items being smuggled into Gaza via a service closely monitored by its own authorities.”

“Such a decision,” he added, “will only intensify the anger and the despair.”

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