Gaza’s anti-narcotics police raided all the storage sites of a drugs consignment in three governorates and seized 1,100 slabs of hashish.[1] Officers arrested a number of traders and dealers during the raids.[1] The police said they had followed information for more than a month that a trader intended to bring a large quantity of drugs into the Gaza Strip, and had located where it was stored.[1] The head of the anti-narcotics directorate, Col. Ahmed al-Qadra, gave the account and called on the Palestinian courts to impose harsh sentences on drug traders.[1] The same raids also seized 250 cartons of narcotic pills, a non-cannabis quantity not counted here.[1]

Al-Qadra said banjo, the local name for cannabis, was grown inside Gaza’s border areas before the police put an end to its cultivation and production after 2007.[1] He said the drugs found in Gaza are smuggled in across the borders and that nothing is grown or manufactured inside the Strip.[1] He said large quantities of hashish had been seized on Gaza’s borders in the current year before they could be smuggled in, among the largest seizures of the past decade.[1]

The Interior Ministry in Gaza published the same account and the same figure of 1,100 slabs in its own statement of 5 February 2017.[2]