[News] Gaza crisis "far beyond humanitarian"
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed May 19 12:20:46 EDT 2010
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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