Black Hole Suspected As Construction Materials Enter Gaza, Disappear

The black hole only attracts new construction materials, as the piles of rubble remaining from last summer’s carnage remain untouched.

Kerem Shalom Crossing, July 5 – Thousands of tons of cement, ceramics, and assorted other construction materials for rebuilding the Gaza Strip have entered the territory from Israel since last summer’s war, but almost none of it has made it to homeowners for reconstruction, leading scientists to believe a specialized black hole has formed in the area.

Israel opens its border crossings daily with the Gaza Strip to allow in the materials for rebuilding the thousands of homes destroyed during the fighting, along with food, medicine, and consumer goods. However, despite the near-constant inflow of materials, nearly a year after Operation Protective Edge, precious few Gazans have been provided with the concrete, tile, and other items they require to rebuild. Instead of winding up in new houses and apartment buildings, the concrete and other items have been vanishing, a phenomenon that physicists argue can only be accounted for by the formation of a singularity, a mass of matter so dense that its gravity sucks in everything around it. In this case, the black hole only attracts new construction materials, as the piles of rubble remaining from last summer’s carnage remain untouched.

While a selective black hole is not yet a proven phenomenon, since gravity is not known to discriminate, physicists find it a convenient explanation for the disappearance of all the Gaza construction materials. “Something seems to be swallowing up all the building supplies, and the more supplies are brought in, the more they disappear, which is consistent with what we know of black holes,” said astrophysicist Figg Lief of Malmo University in Sweden. “The only anomaly, in terms of known black hole attributes, is that it seems to be pulling in only construction materials, and not, for example, interstellar dust, gases, stars, or planets.”

If true, scientists will have to find a way to account for a new type of black hole. “The prospect of an unexplained phenomenon in the universe is exciting,” continued Lief. “Many people think it might be unsettling to cosmologists to encounter the unfamiliar, but any real scientist will tell you it’s what we live for – imagine being a participant in a complete overhaul of everything we know about the universe – that could be what we have here.”

In keeping with the mysterious nature of black holes, scientists have been unable to get close enough to study the object. “We have to make do with inferences from indirect data,” acknowledged Dr. Undrage Tunnler of the University of Rotterdam. “Standard black holes release a burst of x-rays when an object is sucked past the event horizon and effectively gets absorbed, but the hole’s gravity prevents light from escaping its grasp, and that event cannot be directly observed. In the case of the Gaza reconstruction materials, the disappearance of the supplies appears to correlate with spikes in seismological indicators in southern Israel, so at least we know when the black hole is consuming materials, if not its mechanism.”