 | It was a dark and stormy day at the aerodrome. |
AFP: Not only have no planes landed for more than five years, but neither have any pay cheques for the past two months.
| There's nothing unusual about keeping Paleostinian employees on for five years after the last plane has landed, but it's unusual for them not to get pay checks to rake off. |
At Gaza's ghost town airport, time stands still rather than flies.
| No, I don't imagine the flies stand still. They seldom do. Except for the ones that die battering against dusty window panes on a hot summer's day. Then they just lay there, slowly dessicating. Sometimes I wonder: What do dead flies draw? |
"Every morning, we still come to work. We just sit and wait," says Akram Mohammad, one of 500 people on the payroll of the grandly named Yasser Arafat International Airport, who have not received a dime since February.
| "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and other times I just sits." |
The decision by the European Union and United States to suspend direct aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) now that it is run by the radical Islamists of Hamas has meant the 140,000 PA employees went without pay in March and April.
| But the airport workers went for five years without doing any work and continued to collect their pay... |
But despite having their salaries suspended, the vast majority of airport employees still turn up for work everyday. "What else can we do? We can't just lounge around at home," says Akram who works in the travel information department where the phones have long since stopped ringing. "It's not as if we've got anywhere else to work either. Jobs are hard to come by in Gaza," adds Akram, whose two underemployed colleagues nod in agreement.
| "We get paid just as much here as we would someplace else." |
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