A winning formula – withhold salaries in the West Bank to pay for damaged homes in Gaza?

There’s something unclear here.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has generously offered — or maybe even actually sent — millions of dollars or shekels or whatever to Gaza to “compensate” people whose homes have been damaged or destroyed in the recent 22-day IDF Operation Cast Lead, designed to stop rocket firing from Gaza onto Israel.

But, the border crossings are closed into Gaza — pending the successful outcome of Egyptian-led negotiations with Israel — so no reconstruction materials are allowed into Gaza. The tunnels, of course, are still operating, despite regular IDF and sometimes even Egyptian attacks — making them a very risky business.

The crossings will not be opened (or, will not be fully opened, depending on the report) until the successful conclusion of Egyptian-led negotiations between Israel (whose Prime Minister staunchly denies negotiating with Hamas) and Hamas. Prime Minister Olmert has now said that the crossings will not be opened (or, fully opened), until the release of IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit, who was captured just outside the Gaza border in June 2006 and who is believed to be still held somewhere in Gaza.

Though there were special Israel police and intelligence units sent into Gaza during the ground phase of Operation Cast Lead (3 to 18 January), the IDF withdrew from Gaza without Shalit just hours, maybe just minutes, before the inauguration of the new U.S. President Barack Obama.

Egypt, meanwhile, is also coordinating a donor’s conference for Gaza’s reconstruction that is scheduled for 2 March in Cairo (and the new U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton has already pencilled in her participation).

And, at the same time, Egypt is also conducting talks aimed at effecting a reconciliation between Hamas and the PA in Ramallah — in which Egypt is pressing Hamas to accept PA terms. Invitations have already been sent for an event related to that — with a date of 22 February, an implicit deadline.

Back on the ground in Gaza, various UN agencies (UNICEF is one) have set up tent cities in areas of greatest devastation — apparently, in the Izbet Abed Rabbo area of eastern Jabaliya, in Zeitoun, and perhaps (I’m not sure of this) also in the southern Gaza Strip.

Families who have been given cash grants from Hamas for the loss of their residences have reported that there is no place to rent, everything that is still habitable is already occupied.

Still, Fayyad is, or has already, sent money to Gaza for this.

And, as a result, he cannot pay February salaries in the West Bank that were due on the 8th of the month. There was a one-day work stoppage on Saturday, and union leaders are threatening a more severe labour action starting on Tuesday, if the salaries are not paid –to some 170,000 PA employees.

Fayyad is hinting heavily that the donors should quickly cough up more money to cover the bill — to keep the peace, of course, as the donors have been doing, over and over again, since the start of the Oslo process in 1993.

PA leaders in Ramallah, including President Mahmoud Abbas, have said publicly many times — especially during the visits of former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — that the PA spends at least half of its budget in Gaza. Rice, and other U.S. officials, have often repeated it.

What does this money go for? Primarily for paying the salaries of PA employees in Gaza — thousands of whom were ordered by the PA in Ramallah to stay home from work in protest after the Hamas rout of Fatah-led Preventive Security Forces in Gaza in mid-June 2007. Israel had been blocking cash shipments of shekels across the border since December (even before the start of Operation Cast Iron on 27 December), but at the request of Ramallah as well as the EU and the USA it allowed barrels of shekels to cross the border recently, so that people would be able to buy daily necessities of life that can still be found in Gaza.

The PA also pays for the directly-supplied electricity sent on lines across the border by the Israel Electric Corporation, and for some of the gas and fuel supplied. (The European Union has been paying for the heavy industrial diesel fuel needed to run the Gaza Power Plant that supplies electricity to about 500,000 people — half of Gaza’s total population — who live in Gaza City and surrounding areas. But, the bill for this fuel must be much less than the $10 million per month or so that were paid before Israel authorized punitive cut-backs in fuel supplies to Gaza starting in October 2007. And, of course, the Gaza Power Plant has been intermittently shut down on a nearly-regular basis for lack of fuel that Israel is supposed to allow into Gaza … )

There must be something I’m not seeing here, in all this …

Whatever it is, this feels like a situation that appears about to blow.