Hamas crushes green initiatives....

They want to keep Gaza as primitive as possible....easier to then blame Israel...

In the small central Gaza town of Deir el Belah, one family has made a cottage industry out of green innovation.

"There was a period in Gaza when there was no gas or you had to wait for hours in line to get gas. So we made the oven according to our needs," said Maher Youssef Abou Tawahina, who, along with his father, runs a hardware shop in town.

Abou Tawahina is referring to a solar-powered oven that he and his family invented two years ago. The oven, which sits in the family's backyard, takes five minutes to heat up using electricity. Then, its glass ceiling uses the sun to continue the heating process. The oven is not quite hot enough for baking bread, he said, but it's perfect for roasting chicken.

The idea of the solar-powered oven was so well received around Deir El Belah that orders poured in from around the neighborhood. Abou Tawahina said that he and his father built over 30 of them until the insulating glass became unavailable on the market.

A dozen miles up the road, in northern Gaza City, high energy costs also drove Waseem El Khazendar to innovate for his own survival.

When gasoline in Gaza reached $4 per liter, Mr. Khazendar said, he could hardly afford to drive his car, even within the tight confines of Gaza.

As a result, Mr. Khazendar, who was trained as an engineer in Cairo, created Gaza's first-ever electric car.

His innovation made waves throughout Gaza. Palestinians flocked to his office to see the car. Local news outlets, too, were fascinated.

Mr. Khazendar, however, eventually parked his little electric Peugeot in the wrong place -- a factory his family owned in north Gaza, when the war between Hamas and Israel began. The Israeli air force bombed the factory, destroying the car.

These are Gaza's green entrepreneurs.

In this isolated and war-torn territory, however, they are few and far between. Hamas, which effectively runs Gaza, is crushing green initiatives that might contradict the group's message that Palestinians here are suffering because of an Israeli blockade of goods along its border.

"The policy of Hamas is to show we are not developing," said Fouad El-Harazin, a Palestinian-American who founded the National Research Center, an organization in Gaza that is trying to find the funding and supplies to kick start a solar energy project here.

"We depend on Israel with everything," he added. "We want to depend on ourselves."

Mr. Harazin, among others, said that a green Gaza could mean an independent Gaza. But while Israeli border restrictions make importing solar energy equipment difficult, it is Hamas that is actively working against green energy projects here.

"Hamas will say, 'Why did you do that? Do you want to show we have good development? Take it down!'" Mr. Harazin said.

New houses are essential for Palestinians to keep up with their booming population. Palestinians have also, for the most part, been unable to rebuild houses damaged or destroyed in last January's war with Israel.

So with a local company providing the design work, the United Nations' relief agency began its project to build mud houses.

"At first the local government encouraged using mud as alternative building material because cement and steel were not allowed to enter Gaza," said Ahmed Mohaisen, a professor of architecture at the Islamic University of Gaza.

Quickly, though, the government had a change of heart. "They were afraid that when the international community saw that the people had found another way to build buildings, the pressure would go down for Israel to open the gates," Mr. Mohaisen said.