UN impatient as blockade stalls Gaza building

There is a place of strange quiet in the cramped and crowded Gaza Strip.

It looks, from the roof of a nearby United Nations school, like a film set, or perhaps an army's urban warfare training ground.
Ranged across the sandy earth of Khan Younis is a large housing estate: 151 apartments, with space for a further 450.
Most are three-quarters complete. All are uninhabited.
The project is one of 26 schemes, ranging from houses to schools to medical clinics, that have been years in the making.
They all made good progress until June 2007. At that point, the Islamist Hamas movement - which has fired hundreds of rockets at southern Israeli towns - took control of the Gaza Strip after months of violent struggle with its more secular rival, Fatah.
In response, Israel and Egypt tightened their blockade of the Gaza Strip, allowing in little more than basic food and medicine.
For the past 10 months, the UN has been holding intensive, high-level negotiations with Israel, seeking permission to bring in materials such as doors, windows, pipes and tiles to complete these 26 projects.
But UN officials say they have made no headway. Their expressions of dismay are growing stronger.
Fouad Faqawi, a Gazan who works for the United Nations relief agency Unrwa, strides up the rough concrete staircase of one of the Khan Younis housing blocks.
"Nobody can live here," he says, pausing to look inside the shell of a family home for six. "No way - how can people live without plumbing or sewage, or windows or doors?"

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