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Gaza Leaders to Introduce Death Penalty for Drug Smuggling

In response to the mounting drug abuse and addiction among the Palestinians of Gaza, Islamist rulers plan to introduce the death penalty for gangs who make their money by smuggling drugs.

Nidal al-Mughrabi of Reuters India writes that security officials of the Hamas movement and human rights groups say that gangs are increasingly smuggling drugs and other goods through tunnels from Egypt in an attempt to get around the Israeli blockade.

Nearly a third of the 300 prisoners in Gaza's main jail are doing time for drug offenses, but officials say prison is not a sufficient deterrent to the lucrative trade. As a result, Hamas is replacing an Israeli military law and its 10-year maximum sentence with an Egyptian regulation that allows hard labor and capital punishment.

"We saw the Egyptian law as better in dealing with the developing crime and this kind of criminal. It covers a wider field of action," said Gaza Hamas-appointed attorney-general Mohammed Abed. "It is stronger and has tougher punishments including the death penalty," he told Reuters in an interview.

al-Mughrabi writes that the opiate painkiller Tramadol has been popular in the Gaza Strip for the past year among those of the population of 1.5 million who have sought solace in drugs from the devastation inflicted by Israel's three-week military onslaught last January, launched to stop Hamas firing rockets into Israel.

"A million tablets of Tramadol were brought in inside one washing machine," an aide to Abed said. The drug is also easy to smuggle and is popular with the young, especially high-school students.

Psychologists say drugs are used to overcome depression in a society torn by political divisions between Hamas and the rival Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas.
But some people abuse drugs to banish boredom, improve concentration, or for sexual enjoyment.

Gaza's Hamas government officially supports tunnel trade as a way of defying Israel's blockade, and says it closely oversees the goods that flow underground every day.
But human rights groups say there is not nearly enough control to fight the drug trade.

Khalil Abu Shammala, director of Ad-Dameer Association for Human Rights, said the past few months were the "worst in many years" for the spread of the drugs in the strip.
He said stiffened penalties would not stop the crime and called on Hamas to tighten its grip on the tunnel trade.

"Unless we see real intervention and real treatment I think we will face a crisis," Abu Shammala said.

al-Mughrabi writes that the only way Gaza can expect to return to a more normal existence is if the blockade is lifted and conventional trading resumes, with proper customs and police controls and official collaboration with neighbor states.

Gaza prisoners serving jail terms for dealing hashish say they did it simply to make money, in a place some have called "an open-air prison," with no jobs and no future.
Gaza economists put unemployment and poverty rates in Gaza at more than 50 percent. The Israeli offensive wiped out most of local industry and the blockade has prevented the import of steel and cement to rebuild.

Two prisoners who spoke to Reuters said they hoped the new law would not target minor criminals such as themselves while the big fish escape and keep getting rich.

"They cannot prove anything against them, and they are people who look well and speak well. Only little guys like us are the victims," said a jailed father of two. "These tunnels have brought destruction into Gaza."

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