(Bloomberg) - Investment opportunities are rare in the Gaza Strip. So when Nabila Ghabin saw one last year, she pawned her car and jewelry and put $12,000 into a network of tunnels that brought in supplies smuggled from Egypt.
"Nabila, we'll get you 8% per year, compounded"
"But isn't it dangerous to work in a tunnel?"
"We've arranged credit-default swaps with Mutual of Gaza. What could possibly go wrong?" |
She was one of about 4,000 Gazans who gave cash to middlemen and tunnel operators in 2008 as Israel blocked the overland passage of goods. Then Israeli warplanes bombed the tunnels before and during the Dec. 27 to Jan. 18 Gaza offensive and the investments collapsed.
Now investors, who lost as much as $500 million, want their money back from Hamas, which runs Gaza. Hamas Economics Minister Ziad Zaza says about 200 people were taken into custody in connection with the tunnel investments; most have been released. Hamas is offering a partial repayment of 16.5 cents on the dollar using money recovered from Ihab al-Kurd, the biggest tunnel operator.
The imbroglio over the 800 to 1,000 tunnels has deepened Hamas's decline in public opinion in Gaza.
Hamas, classified by the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization, isn't offering enough to cover losses, said Ghabin, 43, whose husband is blind and who has five children. She blames Hamas for encouraging the investments. "The imam told us that we wouldn't regret joining this blessed business," she said in her apartment in an unfinished 12-story high-rise overlooking the Mediterranean as her husband played the lute. "This happened in mosques all over Gaza."
Support for Hamas has fallen amid dissatisfaction over its stewardship of Gaza, where the United Nations estimates that three-quarters of the population has insufficient food and more than 40 percent are unemployed.
A poll published Aug. 17 by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research said Hamas would get 28 percent of the vote if an election were held, down from 33 percent three months earlier. Rival Fatah's support rose to 44 percent from 41 percent in the same period, according to the survey of 1,270 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The margin of error was 3 percent.
| That's three percent plus or minus God-only-knows. How to estimate the odds of being told the truth when each person sits within tribal and politico-religious loyalties under a totalitarian regime? More at the link. |
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