International aid agencies began emergency food relief programs on Monday for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians thrust into poverty by the crippling five-month Israeli closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In the southern Gaza Strip, the UN World Food Program handed out 50-kilogram (110 pound) sacks of wheat flour to Palestinians who have lost jobs due to Israel's blockade, imposed in a bid to halt the spiral of deadly Israeli-Palestinian violence raging since last September.
"We hope to give assistance to 250,000 people," said the WFP's Heather Hill, explaining the four-million-dollar operation that began Monday, February 26, in Rafah near the Egyptian border. "It is the biggest operation yet in the Palestinian territories."
She said the plan — roughly the size of an earthquake relief program in El Salvador earlier this year — would last three months. "We are concerned because people here have lost purchasing power. They can't afford to buy basic commodities," Hill said.
According to the United Nations and the World Bank, unemployment and poverty rates have skyrocketed because of the closure, which prevents the more than 100,000 Palestinians who worked in Israel from reaching their jobs.
UN estimates say about one-third of Palestinians, or one million people, now live in poverty, subsisting on less than two dollars a day. Visiting US Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Israel Sunday to lift the closure, saying it did not contribute to security.
The International Committee of the Red Cross also kicked off Monday a plan to bring soap, blankets and other relief materials to 60 Arab villages sealed off by the Israeli closure. "The responsibility belonging to an occupying force is that people in communities living under its control should be allowed to lead as normal a life as possible", said Kim Gordon-Bates, an ICRC spokesman.
"Economic degradation is not normal, especially when it's forced upon a civilian population by an occupying force," he said. He said the plan, which began in the northern West Bank and is designed to alleviate what he called Israel's "collective punishment" of the Palestinian population, would last several months.
"The point of the journey isn't so much the relief material, but the point is to try and get access and to try to lift the closures, which are in contradiction with the Fourth Geneva Convention that states that an occupying force has certain responsibilities to the people they are occupying," Gordon-Bates told AFP, as he negotiated with Israeli soldiers to allow the shipment of aid materials through a checkpoint in the northern West Bank.
Israel's incoming Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat must first publicly call for a halt to violence before the blockade can be eased, one of his aides said Sunday.
"We are aware of the economic hardships and we would certainly like to take steps to help the Palestinian population at large," Sharon's diplomatic advisor Zalman Shoval said. "(Arafat) has for the first time ever to make a public statement to his own people in Arabic that he wants violence to stop," he said.
Arafat has said that Israel is behind the wave of violence, which has left some 420 people dead since September 28, most of them Palestinians. — (AFP, Gaza City)
by Sakher Abu el Oun
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
