[News] Gaza crisis "far beyond humanitarian"

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Gaza crisis "far beyond humanitarian"
Report, The Electronic Intifada, 19 May 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11272.shtml


DUBAI (IRIN) - With a failing economy, rising unemployment and 
deteriorating power, sanitation and health facilities, the health of 
Gaza's population continues to worsen, according to a recent World 
Health Organization (WHO) report. In contrast, modest improvements 
have been made in the West Bank.

As a consequence of Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, 98 percent 
of industrial operations have been shut down since 2007 and there are 
acute shortages of fuel, cash, cooking gas and other basic supplies.

"We are telling everybody not to build walls all around Gaza. That's 
what we have been saying loud and clear," Filippo Grandi, 
commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), 
told IRIN. "If Gaza gets encircled by walls everywhere, it can only 
explode. This is almost a law of physics. And that would be a 
catastrophe for everybody around -- for the Egyptians, for the 
Israelis and for the region as a whole."

He said the most important thing was to continue negotiating with the 
Israelis for full access of supplies to be granted legally -- through 
crossings not tunnels.

Import ban

The ban on imports of building materials has prevented the rebuilding 
of some 6,400 homes destroyed or severely damaged by Israel's winter 
invasion of Gaza in 2008-2009 and prevented the construction of some 
7,500 homes to cater for an expanding population. Some 3,500 families 
are still displaced.

"The Israeli position is that they must be absolutely sure that 
anything that goes into Gaza through the crossings on the Israeli 
side is for civilian and humanitarian purposes," said UNRWA's Grandi. 
"The UN has developed extensive tools to monitor [imports], and we 
have shared this with the Israelis to approve. If they want, we can 
offer all the guarantees in the world. Our problem is that in spite 
of all this assistance we cannot import."

Water-related health problems are widespread in the Strip because of 
the blockade and Israel's military operation in Gaza, which destroyed 
water and sanitation infrastructure, including reservoirs, wells and 
thousands of kilometers of piping.

"Gaza is not a refugee camp in a small remote place. It's a city of 
one and a half million people with the needs of a developed urban 
environment that is used to certain standards. It needs certain 
standards of maintenance. This is what is happening with the water 
supplies, with sanitation. We're very worried about that and the 
Egyptians and the Israelis should be too. Everybody should be worried 
because contaminated water has no borders," said Grandi.

An electricity crisis continues in Gaza with the network only able to 
meet 70 percent of demand due to insufficient money to buy fuel for 
the Gaza power plant, and a lack of spare parts which is causing 
technical failures.

In contrast the West Bank economy appears to be growing since the 
beginning of 2009, partly due to an influx of donor assistance but 
also because Israel has eased movement restrictions there, and an 
improved security environment has led to increased investor 
confidence and more economic activity.

Unemployment, poverty

Unemployment in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) decreased 
marginally in the third quarter of 2009 compared to the same period 
in 2008, to 31.4 percent, though unemployment among young people 
stood at 67 percent. Just one in seven women were working, and 70 
percent of families were living on less than US $1 a day in May 2008, 
said the WHO report.

In the third quarter of 2008, 51 percent of Palestinians lived below 
the poverty line (56 percent for Gazans and 48 percent for those in 
the West Bank), with 19 percent living in extreme poverty.

In the second half of 2008, one third of West Bank households and 71 
percent of Gaza households received food assistance, with food 
accounting for roughly half total household expenditures -- making 
families highly vulnerable to food price fluctuations. In May 2008, 
56 percent of Gazans and 25 percent of West Bank residents were 
deemed food insecure by the UN. Chronic malnutrition has risen in 
Gaza over the past few years to reach 10.2 percent.

That comes at a time when UNRWA -- responsible for providing 
assistance, protection and advocacy for some 4.7 million registered 
Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the OPT -- is 
projecting a 25 percent shortfall in its core budget. "UNRWA is a 
very massive machine to feed and unfortunately, although our 
donations increase, in fact they don't increase fast enough to meet 
the needs," Grandi said.

Health

Healthcare services have generally improved in the occupied West Bank 
over the past year because of eased movement restrictions and the 
efforts of the Palestinian Ministry of Health with the support of 
donors and other stakeholders. However, the impact of Israel's wall 
in the occupied West Bank and the difficulties of access to hospitals 
in occupied East Jerusalem, where nearly 50 percent of Health 
Ministry referrals were to in 2009, remain areas of concern.

In Gaza, Israel's blockade is debilitating the healthcare system, 
limiting medical supplies and the training of medical personnel and 
preventing serious medical cases from traveling outside the Strip for 
specialized treatment.

Israel's 2008-2009 invasion damaged 15 of the Strip's 27 hospitals 
and damaged or destroyed 43 of its 110 primary health care 
facilities, none of which have been repaired or rebuilt because of 
the construction materials ban. Some 15-20 percent of essential 
medicines are commonly out of stock and there are shortages of 
essential spare parts for many items of medical equipment, the WHO report said.

As a result, the steady decline in the infant mortality rate in 
recent decades has stalled over the past few years and may have even 
risen in Gaza, which has a mortality rate around 30 percent higher 
than in the West Bank. Watery diarrhea, acute bloody diarrhea and 
viral hepatitis are the major causes of morbidity among reportable 
infectious diseases in the Strip.

Reliable data on maternal mortality and morbidity trends were 
generally not available.

"Very often journalists ask me whether I define the crisis in Gaza as 
humanitarian and I give this reply: it's far beyond humanitarian. 
It's much more serious," said Grandi. "You can address a humanitarian 
crisis with medicines and food; this is far more serious. It's a 
crisis of the economy first of all -- people are very poor. It's a 
crisis of the institutions and it's a crisis of the infrastructure. 
This requires years to fix."

The WHO report, released on 13 May, was the result of a fact-finding 
mission to assess the health and economic situation in the OPT in 
response to Resolution WHA62.2, adopted on 21 May 2009 at the 62nd 
World Health Assembly, which called, among other things on Israel to 
"lift immediately the closure in the occupied Palestinian territory, 
particularly the closure of the crossing points of the occupied Gaza 
Strip that are causing the serious shortage of medicines and medical supplies."

This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and 
information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the 
United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or 
reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the 
<http://www.irinnews.org/copyright.aspx>copyright page for conditions 
of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of 
Humanitarian Affairs.



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