Zionists caused $4-6bn damage to besieged strip

RAMALLAH: A month of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip will cost the Palestinian territory at least $4-6 billion in damages, deputy economy minister Taysir Amro said Tuesday. Amro told AFP the figure included only “direct damages” to the Gaza economy and warned it could climb further once additional impacts on the 1.8 million population are taken into account. A more precise assessment would be carried out once calm returns permanently to the overpopulated sliver of territory. Amro said international donors were expected to meet in Norway in September, but gave no further details. A 72-hour truce, brokered by Egypt and the United States, came into effect at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) on Tuesday as the last Israeli troops left the battered enclave. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and last week the Gaza Strip’s only power plant was shelled, imposing total blackouts. Meanwhile, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro compared Israel’s offensive in Gaza on Tuesday to a “disgusting form of fascism” that its ally, the United States, is unable to control. “I think that a new and disgusting form of fascism is emerging with considerable force at this moment in human history,” Castro wrote in a column in the newspaper Granma titled “Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza.” “Why does the government of this country (Israel) think that the world will be impervious to this macabre genocide that is being committed today against the Palestinian people?” he asked. “Maybe it hopes that the complicity of the North American (US) empire will be ignored in this shameless massacre?” the 87-year-old former president said. AFP