Demonstrators took to the streets as the boy's body was being moved to a hospital, saying they were protesting against the incompetent way Hamas ruled Gaza. Anger spilled over after the boy died and his infant sister suffered critical burns when a candle lit amid a power outage burnt their house down.
Anti-Hamas protests in Gaza, where power failures have left households with just six hours of electricity a day since February, are extremely rare. Three children were killed earlier in the year by similar fires during an outage.
Hamas blames the electricity shortages on Egypt which it says is restricting the flow of fuel, and on Israel, which imposed a blockade on the coastal enclave in 2007 when Hamas seized control from the Western-backed Palestinian Fatah party.
Boy’s death ignites rare anti-Hamas protests |
"I call on people to take to the streets and not to fear being clubbed by policemen," Abdel-Fattah Al-Baghdadi, 23, told Reuters.
"I hold both the governments in Gaza and in the West Bank responsible for what happened to us," he said.
Taher Al-Nono, a spokesman for the Hamas government in Gaza, said the death of Baghdadi's son was a message to Egypt that it had to speed up its promised efforts to help solve the power crisis in Gaza.
"The international community's silence is an accomplice in the crime of blockading Gaza," Nono said in a statement.
(Reuters)
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