Fourth «Face the Public» session — Sayel: a call to shield the electricity crisis from political tug-of-war

Walid Salman, chief executive of the Gaza Electricity Generating Company, affirmed that the electricity crisis requires the governments of Gaza and the West Bank to stand together and cooperate in order to end it, indicating that they at the Energy Authority are seeking to solve it.

During the “Face the Public” programme organised by Pal-Think for Strategic Studies within the project “Towards a pluralistic, democratic and institutional political system in Palestine”, Salman asked the Energy Authority to prepare the main transmission lines in order to transport the fuel through them without any problems, indicating that the equipment had been received from the supplier at the Swedish company and inspected.

Speaking via videoconference from Abu Dhabi, Salman called on the dismissed government to implement the “collection” agreement regarding deducting 170 shekels from employees' salaries in order to contribute to solving the crisis.

Salman stressed that the electricity project must be kept neutral from political tugging and treated with sound solutions for the sake of the Palestinian citizen's interest, and among these solutions is an agreement with Egypt in order to obtain fuel, or through funding from the Arab Gulf states and developing the fields discovered in Gaza to develop gas services in Palestine.

For his part, Sharhabeel, board member at the Electricity Company, affirmed that after the shelling of the transformers in the last war on Gaza it has come to accommodate 80 megawatts after it used to accommodate 120 megawatts, indicating that if fuel were supplied at the current price so that two turbines could be operated, the cost of production would be double the cost of a single kilowatt from Israel, and this is a burden on the Palestinian citizen amid the conditions of siege he lives through.

In the same context, the engineer Fadi al-Batsh of the Electricity Company affirmed that the collection does not suffice to cover the price of the fuel and that the Authority in Ramallah takes a high rate of tax on the fuel, and that the tax rate must be modest so that citizens are not squeezed.