JABALIA, PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES    -    Living in one of the poorest parts of the Middle East and facing some of the region’s highest fuel costs, Palestinians in Gaza are burning plastic to make affordable diesel. It’s an economic and practical solution in a territory blockaded by Israel for 15 years, but one which poses seri­ous environmental and health risks, experts say. Standing before rusty metal machinery and fuel containers, Mahmoud al-Kafarneh described how he and his brothers came up with their plas­tic recycling project. “We started experiment­ing to implement the project in 2018, through searching the internet,” he told AFP, at the site in the Jabalia area of northern Gaza. “We failed a few times; after eight months we succeeded in extracting the fuel.” The distilling setup fea­tures a series of crude-looking tanks and con­necting pipes set up outside on the dirt