"Food is not enough, there is no water, electricity is supplied very few hours a day only. The shops are empty, there are no jobs, medicines are difficult to come by. Children cry and are desperate. And the international community says nothing". Father Manuel Musallam, the Catholic parish priest of Gaza, entrusts to SIR "his dramatic appeal", aiming at "breaking the wall of silence around the Strip", on which the risk of an attack from the Israeli army is growing. "The borders are closed he states , but we are not living so much in a prison as in a torture chamber. The state the populations is in is dramatic". In this predicament, Christians also have to face the attacks of the Islamic extremists. News of a terrorist attack in the Greek Orthodox multipurpose centre of Gaza, the Young men’s Christian association (Ymca), which devastated the library, with thousands of books gone up in smoke, has just arrived. An attack that, according to the parish priest, "is not targeted to the Christian community, but maybe to a certain Western lifestyle. The Centre, according to an extremist view of Islam, would be a bit too liberal. Then, there’s the memory of the blasphemous cartoons in Denmark, the fact dates back to these days three years ago, and is still hot". (dnr)” ” ” ” ” “
