The Gaza Strip. Photo: IDF.

Ma’an writes:

The Gaza Strip has been without a functioning power plant since the beginning of November, when the plant ran out of diesel fuel as a result of the tightening of a seven-year-long blockade imposed on the territory by Israel with Egyptian support.

The plant didn’t run out of fuel because of any Israeli blockade. It ran out because Hamas refused to pay the going rates according to existing agreements with the PA. They chose to let their people suffer instead.

The plant itself was only reopened last year after it was targeted by an Israeli airstrike in the 2006 assault on the Strip.

Ma’an has been writing this in other articles as well. It is completely false. The power plant has been running since December 2007.

In another Ma’an article:

UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness said that large regions of the Gaza Strip are a “disaster area” and called on the world community to lift the Israeli blockade in order to allow recovery efforts to proceed, in a statement sent to Ma’an.

The Kerem Shalom crossing has never – not once – hit its capacity of allowing goods and aid into Gaza. Most days it is only at about half of what it can handle. If the closure was causing the problems in Gaza, wouldn’t we be seeing Kerem Shalom over capacity?

Israel used to limit a lot of goods into Gaza. That ended over four years ago – since then, any goods that could not be used against Israel militarily have been allowed in. But anti-Israel organizations like UNRWA like to lie to pressure Israel.

There’s more.

Ma’an “reported” on Friday:

The Gaza government’s Disaster Response Committee announced late Friday that Israeli authorities had opened up dams just east of the Gaza Strip, flooding numerous residential areas in nearby villages within the coastal territory.

Committee chairman Yasser Shanti said in a press conference that Israeli authorities had opened up dams just to the east of the border with the Gaza Strip earlier in the day.

He warned that residential areas within the Gaza Valley would be flooding within the coming hours.

And look at that – they did get flooded, just as he predicted! The torrential rains had little to do with the Gazans being under up to 2 meters of water – it was all from Israel keeping huge amounts of water in storage in the Negev, just waiting for the right time to flood Gaza! (Which, coincidentally, happens during rainstorms.)

Iran’s PressTV reported the dam story as well, as multiple Gazans told the tall tale:

Followers of this blog may remember that there was flooding in Gaza during a huge rainstorm in 2010, and they blamed Israel opening up a dam then as well.

I looked hard to find any dam between southern Israel (which is, of course, desert) and Gaza. Finally, I found it.

In 2001, a reservoir in Nahal Oz burst, and it did cause some flooding in Gaza. NGO Al Mezan said that the 2010 flooding was caused by the same “dam” that was opened by Israel in 2001, just to make Gazans’ lives miserable.

And the “dam” story seemed to grow from there from a simple lie to a complex web of lies.