By Jasmin Mahmoud

There are no perfect measures of the toll the Gaza blockade is taking on the 1.9 million residents locked inside, but those that give a glimpse tend to be pretty macabre. The number of suicide attempts handled by Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, for example, has surged in recent years, now up to an average of 30-40 attempted suicides each month, according to medical sources. The typical victim is still in the prime of life, between 15 and 45 years old, and slightly more likely to be male than female. Common methods run the gamut, from hanging to shootings to cutting to jumping.

Among the oft-cited factors is the lack of agency felt among unemployed Gazans, whose rubble-strewn path to a better life is increasingly shrouded by the unyielding fog of geopolitics. Gazans have few clear opportunities to improve life for themselves or their families. With the harsh circumstances in Gaza frozen largely by unrelenting external pressures, lives inside the narrow strip are led in a sort of permanent limbo, and this situation seems likely to continue.

Since 2000, after the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada, Israel has continually squeezed access to the Gaza Strip, effectively punishing everyone inside, whatever their support for anti-Israeli militancy. One particularly corrosive result as been joblessness. On Aug. 15, 2005, for example, when Israel declared it would unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, one group whose livelihoods were caught in the turbulence was the thousands of Palestinians employees working at Israeli factories in the Erez industrial zone, on the northern edge of the strip.

The situation escalated after Hamas won the majority in 2006 legislative elections. Fatah refused to acknowledge the election results, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas labeling the Gaza Strip as a rebellious province. Leaders of Hamas’ militant wing, the al-Qassam brigades, as well as those of the Alweyat Alnasser brigades were then arrested in military operation targeting the Kerem Shalom military checkpoint.

The siege on Gaza tightened, with Israel closing almost all the border crossings from Israel and cutting off imports of any type of raw material that could be perceived as potentially useful for militants. The three subsequent large-scale military operations launched by Israel destroyed most of the remaining factories and further eroded the commercial infrastructure. Unemployment soared among Gazans, as the cutoff took its toll.

Today, official unemployment rates typically hover around 67 percent, though many scrape by with work in the informal sector. Poverty rates are closer to 80 percent. Whatever nuance is absent in the statistics, the reality defies sugarcoating: For the vast majority of Gazans, there is no way to get the money needed to live a healthy, normal life. This problem is exacerbated by large size of families in Gaza, which average between five and 16 members, increasing pressure for the necessities of life — work, food, education, medical care, housing, public safety — that also happen to underpin communal stability.

According to his family, these pressures are the reason that Mohammed Aldremly, age 33, immolated himself on July 12. The father of five could not pay the rent on the family home and could not bear to see his children live hungry and homeless. In his own eyes, he was a failure. So, according to his family, Mohammed “ran away to the next life, where maybe he’ll find a better world.”

“When this Gaza is your life, there is no difference from death,” says the family, which does not absolve Hamas of blame for the situation in Gaza and hopes it will find a way to let it live without the wars that worsen the suffering.

In fact, this same environment of frustration and despair exist within Hamas itself. Hamas police officer Nidal Qanita, 35, from Al Shatea camp, burned and killed himself at a police station on June 12 allegedly because the Bank of Hamas cut his salary by around 40 percent, denying him the ability to pay down mounting debts, a close friend of his friend said. It was the first publicly reported instance of a member of Hamas committing suicide. suicide. The friend told me that the Hamas government is facing an economic crisis, the effects of which cannot be assuaged by political means. The friend says he thinks Hamas may soon be facing an internal crisis marked by additional such attempts — a crisis that reflects the despair throughout the broader Gazan population.