Everybody, all together: “awww!” Empty pockets promise grim Eid feast for Gazans.

GAZA CITY (AFP) - In Gaza City’s Firas market the stalls are laden with gift items and toys, fireworks and new clothes, cooking utensils and fish, as people crowd around, looking, touching and walking on.

As the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan draws to an end and people look ahead to the Eid al-Fitr holiday that follows, there is little thought of feasting, except to look back fondly to Eids gone past.

Amid the din of shopkeepers hawking their wares over loudspeakers, Abdulkarim says “people are coming, but they’re not buying … They don’t have any money.”

“I only get paid 1,500 shekels (360 dollars, 280 euros) and I have a family of 10,” says this member of the Palestinian presidential guard who has come to the market with his two children. “This year, there will be no presents.”

Abdulkarim is one of the 170,000 civil servants in the Palestinian territories who have not been properly paid since the Islamist movement Hamas formed a government in March. The United States and European Union, who have blacklisted Hamas as a terror group, cut off financial aid to the Palestinians.

The crisis, which spreads across the economy, is compounded by Israel’s freezing of millions of dollars a month in customs revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinians.

It is not just a shortage of cash that promises to put a damper on one of the two major holidays in the Muslim calendar. It is a violent death cult society that voted into office an openly genocidal terrorist gang for a government.

(OK, I admit it. I added the last sentence. Agence France Presse wasn’t going to.)