Hamas to introduce death penalty in Gaza for drugs

Hamas rulers in the Gaza Strip plan to introduce the death penalty for gangs getting rich off smuggled narcotics.

Security officials of the Hamas movement and human rights groups say drug smuggling through tunnels that bring in all manner of goods from Egypt to get around the Israeli blockade as increased alarmingly in the past few months.

Nearly a third of 300 prisoners in Gaza's main jail are doing time for drug offenses, but officials say prison is clearly not a sufficient deterrent to the lucrative trade.

So Hamas is getting tough, replacing an Israeli military law and its 10-year maximum sentence with an Egyptian regulation that allows hard labor and capital punishment.

"We saw the Egyptian law as better in dealing with the developing crime and this kind of criminal. It covers a wider field of action," said Gaza Hamas-appointed attorney-general Mohammed Abed.

"It is stronger and has tougher punishments including the death penalty," he told Reuters in an interview in his office.

Abed has no shortage of evidence seized recently.

A storage room in the prosecutor's headquarters is full of washing machines, tape packs of cheese that were stuffed with hashish and pills.

The opiate pain-killer Tramadol has been a big seller in the Gaza Strip for the past year among those of the population of 1.5 million who have found solace in drugs from after Israel's three-week military onslaught last January, launched to stop Hamas firing rockets into Israel.

"A million tablets of Tramadol were brought in inside one washing machine," an aide to Abed said. The psychedelic ecstasy is also easy to smuggle and is popular with the young. Police say it is sold in Gaza high schools.

Psychologists say drugs are used to overcome depression in a society torn by political divisions between Hamas and the rival Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas, whose visions of the Palestinian future diverge radically.

Hamas rejects any peace deal that recognizes Israel. Fatah wants to make a pace with the Jewish state and create a Palestinian state alongside it, in the West Bank and Gaza.

But the motivations of some drug-users are also banal: to banish boredom, improve concentration or for sexual enjoyment.

Gaza's Hamas government officially supports tunnel trade as a way of defying Israel's blockade, and says it closely oversees the goods that flow underground every day.

But human rights groups say there is not nearly enough control to fight the drug trade.

Khalil Abu Shammala, director of Ad-Dameer Association for Human Rights, said the past few months were the "worst in many years" for the spread of the drugs in the strip.

He said stiffened penalties would not stop the crime and called on Hamas to tighten its grip on the tunnel trade.

"Unless we see real intervention and real treatment I think we will face a crisis," Abu Shammala said.

But the only way Gaza can expect to return to a more normal existence is if the blockade is lifted and conventional trading resumes, with proper customs and police controls and official collaboration with neighbor states.

Only detente between Israel and Hamas can make that happen.

Gaza prisoners serving jail terms for dealing hashish say they did it simply to make money, in a place with no jobs and no future.

Gaza economists put unemployment and poverty rates in Gaza at more than 50 percent. The Israeli offensive wiped out most of local industry and the blockade has prevented the import of steel and cement to rebuild.

Two prisoners who spoke to Reuters said they hoped the new law would not target minor criminals such as themselves while the big fish escape and carry on getting rich.

"They cannot prove anything against them, and they are people who look well and speak well. Only little guys like us are the victims," said a jailed father of two.

"These tunnels have brought destruction into Gaza."