The desolated landscape Israeli bulldozers have left behind across the Gaza Strip reflects the state of the Palestinian economy 12 months after the outbreak of the intifada, from which it could take years to recover.
Israel closed the borders of the West Bank and Gaza shortly after the start of the uprising, a measure which it said was taken for security reasons, but which also choked off three million Palestinians who perceived the closure as another repression tool.
"We have nothing to put on our bread!" says Farial Al-Khissa, a mother of eight who lives in the poor Gaza City neighborhood of Shajaiya and whose husband lost his job in Israel.
According to UN estimates, more than 100,000 Palestinians out of the 125,000 who used to work in Israel or in Israeli settlements and industrial zones in the territories, as well as 80,000 others working in the territories, lost their jobs in the first months of the intifada, which broke out on September 28, 2000.
The UN also assesses at around eight to $10 million per working day the losses provoked by the closure, on the basis of a Gross Domestic Product which had been forecast at $17 million for 2000.
The most badly hit industries are tourism, which had attracted substantial investment in 2000 in the West Bank, and the building sector, said the World Bank economist for the Palestinian territories Sebastien Dessus.
The situation "has somewhat stabilized ... a new balance has been reached but at a very low level," he explained, predicting that the economy will continue to decline slowly.
According to the monetary institution, by the end of 2001, nearly 50 percent of Palestinians will be living under the UN's poverty line of two dollars a day, against 20 percent a year earlier.
"People have exhausted their savings and are concentrating whatever money they have on buying food," said Mushtaq Quraishi, the head of the World Food Program (WFP) for the Palestinian territories.
In an economy where only "7.5 percent of food requirement is produced locally, access to food depends on the purchasing power of people," he added. The traditional network of family solidarity can no longer act as a "safety net" in the crisis now facing the Palestinian population, Dessus said.
The Palestinians have switched to survival mode, with the economy becoming increasingly makeshift, he explained, referring to all the "small jobs" which have appeared near Israeli checkpoints.
In addition to the sealing off of the occupied territories, the Israeli army has dotted Gaza and especially the West Bank with roadblocks, which have stretched travel times and make any economic activity very precarious.
In the Gaza Strip, the average length of a car trip from Gaza City in the north to Khan Yunis in the south jumped from 30 minutes to two hours. The time it takes to cover the distance between Ramallah and Nablus in the West Bank has also leapt from 45 minutes to two hours.
Many children now sell cigarettes or drinks at the roadblocks, while some of them get paid for crossing with solitary drivers, to whom access is banned by the Israeli army for fear of suicide attacks.
In the event of a return to a pre-intifada situation, it would take two or three years to reach the same level of per capita income again, according to Dessus.
"The Palestinian institutions are not sustainable," partly because Israel is blocking tax money which should be paid to the Palestinian Authority, said UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Terje Roed-Larsen.
These unpaid taxes, which used to account for up to two thirds of the PA's fiscal revenue, are now estimated at $200 million. "Without a very significant budgetary support from the Gulf and the European Union ... we would see a very radical erosion of the Palestinian institutions," said Roed-Larsen. He warned against their collapse and does not rule out a "worse case scenario ... of complete chaos where the power of local warlords prevails." ― (AFP, Gaza City)
by Selim Saheb Ettaba
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
