THE smell hits you from a mile away. On the southern edge of Gaza City the crystalline blue Mediterranean is being transmuted into a vast, bobbing pool of raw sewage, the product of half a million people with nowhere else for their effluent to flow. A three-way row between Gaza, the West Bank and Israel has seen electricity supplies cut to a trickle. One casualty has been the strip’s sewage treatment stations.

It is ten years since Hamas, an Islamist political party with a lethal military wing, took over Gaza. In June 2007 it threw out its rivals from Fatah, the nationalist faction that runs the Palestine Liberation Organisation. A year earlier, it had beaten Fatah in elections held in the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war. The split left Fatah to rule the West Bank, Hamas to control Gaza, and both sides to conspire in an elaborate fiction that the two still form a single whole. The intervening decade has not been kind to Gaza, its people or even its new masters. Hamas runs the strip as an increasingly corrupt and oppressive one-party state, with a strictly controlled press and a nervous populace who clam up or look over their shoulders before talking about the government.

Gaza probably has the highest unemployment rate in the world, at 40% or more. Among young people it is around two-thirds. For its 2m people, whose GDP per head runs at not much more than $1,000 a year, there are few jobs and little chance of leaving the strip. Because of a shortage of power and of raw materials, as well as the damage done to Gaza’s few factories in the three wars fought between Hamas and Israel since 2007, virtually everything is imported, except for a few fish, tomatoes and bits of wooden furniture.

Donkey-carts are a common sight, because fuel is too expensive for most. The markets and some surprisingly plush new shopping malls groan with goods, but almost all are brought in from Israel through the border crossing at Kerem Shalom, the only one now open for trade. Most raw materials are banned or restricted (Israel says they could be used to make rockets or to dig terrorist tunnels), but you can buy an iPhone 7 or a large flat-screen TV, if you have the money. Not many people do.

Powerless in Gaza

Samir al-Ijlah used to run a thriving general-goods company on the eastern edge of Gaza City. In August 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, the most recent of Gaza’s wars, Israeli shells destroyed his home, his warehouse and $1m worth of stock. “People couldn’t even figure out where their houses used to be,” he says. “Everything was brought down. We found pieces of 17 bodies under the wreckage.” His house has been rebuilt, along with around half of the 20,000 buildings destroyed or badly damaged in the war. For his lost business there has been no compensation, and after quarterly payments of 1,800 shekels ($510) that lasted for a year, the Hamas government has given him nothing to live on. He depends, he says, on savings which are rapidly running out. “No one around here has a job,” says his neighbour, Abu Saber, who lost his four brothers in one dreadful evening. “Before, 120,000 people used to go daily into Israel to work. Now, no one can.”

As Hamas marked the tenth anniversary of its takeover last month, there was little for it to celebrate. Its main supporter is the Gulf state of Qatar, which is under embargo from its powerful Arab neighbours. That means Qatari aid to Gaza has been partly suspended; and the rest is in doubt. At the same time, the cold war between Hamas and Fatah has intensified. Most analysts blame this primarily on Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), based in Ramallah in the West Bank. He appears to have concluded that cracking down on Hamas will win him favour with Donald Trump, and that this could strengthen his hand in any American-brokered Israel-Palestine peace talks.

Mr Abbas is squeezing the people in Gaza. He has cut the pay of civil servants there (many of whom went on being paid by Ramallah despite the split). He has reduced the amount of medicine, baby milk and other essential goods that the PA provides to Gaza, and he has cut the amount of money that the PA pays Israel to supply the bulk of Gaza’s power. In mid-June, Israel decided to reduce power supplies proportionally, so most households now get two hours of power a day instead of the previous four. Sewage treatment, water desalination, hospitals and the telecoms system are foundering. Generators provide backup, but these rely on fuel oil brought in from Egypt, and the PA is blocking payments for that. As another result Gaza’s only power plant shut down on July 12th. The PA is also refusing permission to most Gazans who need to travel to the West Bank or Israel for medical treatment; three babies died as a result last month.

Israel’s decision to let the PA squeeze Hamas seems to many foolish. “I spent years killing Hamas terrorists,” says Noam Tibon, an Israeli former major-general. “But you have to give people some hope. When someone is in a corner, he has no choice but to kick out. It’s in Israel’s interest to support Gaza’s economy, not to strangle it. We should be giving them a port, power, water and jobs in Israel.” His view is not shared by the government, which has rejected overtures from Hamas to offer a ten-year hudna, or ceasefire, in return for being allowed to build a seaport. Israel controls not just the land crossings, but the waters off the Gaza coast, and there is no port at all. To be allowed one Gaza would probably have to agree to full demilitarisation, and this is a step too far for Hamas to take.

Many people now fear a return to war. The primary threat is not from Hamas or the other main militia in the territory, Islamic Jihad. The bigger risk is that more extreme Salafist groups will fire rockets at Israel, hoping to provoke a conflict that Hamas politicians currently want to avert, in the knowledge that more devastation will only increase the unpopularity of their rule. Hamas is reckoned to have hunted down and locked up as many as 300 Salafists, some of them engineers who know how to make simple rockets that can easily hit Israeli villages, or even Tel Aviv, only 60km away. But there are undoubtedly many more, and as tempers fray in the hot, powerless summer, they may lash out.

Others, including Israeli spooks, fear that Hamas’s politicians may themselves turn more radical again, as the organisation’s military wing seeks to assert itself. In May, the political leadership issued a new policy document that aimed to update Hamas’s uncompromising founding charter. It hinted that it might accept, at least temporarily, a Palestinian state existing on less than the whole of the Palestine that existed before Israel was founded in 1948. But the elevation in February to Hamas’s number-two slot of Yahya Sinwar, a former military leader, suggests that the moderate politicians are losing ground to the military wing. “They are preparing for war again, no question,” says an intelligence source. “The military guys feel that the politicians have let them down.” Others optimistically see signs of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah in the rumoured possible return to Gaza of Mohammed Dahlan, the leader of Fatah in Gaza before the split. Meanwhile, Gaza’s stinking summer just keeps getting more desperate.