Palestine: Israel destroys dairy again

April 10, 2010
Issue 

It was not a chemical plant, nor a nuclear facility, nor a manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction. But almost all the rubble of the entirely destroyed factory was covered in white, with white chunks everywhere.

These were pieces of cheese, butter and yoghurt — some of the products made by the Dalloul dairy factory in southern Gaza City.

Israeli warplanes bombed the factory shortly just after midnight on April 2, leaving the building, all its equipment and the distribution van completely destroyed.

"At 12:30am we heard a very loud explosion nearby", said owner Mutassim Dalloul as he inspected the wreckage that morning. "I got downstairs to find my factory completely destroyed."

This was not the first Israeli attack on the factory.

"During the January 2009 war on Gaza, Israeli warplanes hit my factory, inflicting an estimated loss of half a million dollars", Dalluol said. "However, my brothers and I decided to rebuild it, so we now have a newly-destroyed dairy."

He estimated the losses from the latest attack to be at least $100,000.

The Dalloul dairy is located in southern Gaza City, far from the Gaza-Israel boundary. "At least 60 family members used to be supported from the work at this diary", Dalloul explained. "I myself have a family of nine, including myself and my wife."

The attack on the Dalloul factory was part of about a dozen air raids carried out across the Gaza Strip in what Israel said was a response to rockets fired from Gaza into nearby Israeli towns.

"I cannot imagine what my factory has to do with the ongoing situation", Dalloul said. "Can you see a homemade rocket? Can you see a single bullet? Can you see a gun?

"Why did they attack my dairy?"

Since June 2007 — when Israel tightened its blockade of Gaza — the economy has sunk into a deep depression as unemployment has hit as high as 70%. Poverty among the 1.5 million residents has reached unprecedented levels with more than 80% of the population dependent on food aid provided by the United Nations.

Dalloul's was one of the few dairies meeting Gaza's needs.

Mustafa al-Qayed, a local resident, expressed resentment at the attack: "The destroyed factory used to provide our neighborhood with milk and cheese daily."

He noted that the prices of the locally-made products were much lower than the Israeli products that were occasionally imported into Gaza.

About 95% of Gaza's local industrial facilities have been forced to shut down because of the closure of Gaza's commercial crossings. The closing of these facilities has rendered more than 70,000 Gaza labourers jobless.

During its December 2008-January 2009 attack on Gaza, Israel destroyed a number of other facilities central to Gaza's food supply, including the al-Badr flour mill — the only functioning one in the territory — and the Sawafiry chicken farm which supplied the vast majority of the territory's eggs.

The United Nations-commissioned Goldstone report found that attacks on Gaza's water, food and agricultural infrastructure appeared to be part of a deliberate pattern.

Dalloul said: "The same way we rebuilt our factory that was bombarded during the war, we are determined to rebuild this one.

"We are determined with a great deal of hope to resume our production, to say to our enemy that whatever you do will never make us succumb."

[Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip. This article is abridged from Electronic Intifada.]

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