UN Palestine refugee agency launches emergency appeal for $193 million
The main United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees launched an emergency appeal today for $193 million to relieve suffering in the occupied territories where three years of curfews, closures and conflict have plunged two-thirds of the people into dire poverty and hunger and limited their access to health and education.
The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) needs the funds for 2004 to continue operating the largest food aid programme in the West Bank and Gaza, feeding over one million people, and to provide shelter to the homeless, counselling for traumatized children, additional medical services and crucial work programmes for the unemployed.
“I urge donors to assist UNRWA in caring for the thousands who have lost their jobs or their homes,” the agency’s Commissioner-General Peter Hansen told representatives of the international donor community in Jerusalem.
“UNRWA needs this funding if it is to repair some of the damage done to the minds and emotions of the children it cares for, or to simply provide food for the hungry. In such dark and desperate times it falls upon the international community to keep some hope alive,” Mr. Hansen added.
A critical element of the 2004 programme will be the provision of help to the tens of thousands of refugees whose livelihoods are threatened by the West Bank barrier, which Israel is building between itself and the Palestinians. UNRWA will continue to monitor the impact of the wall/fence on refugees – already the first phase has affected 90,000 refugees – and adapt its humanitarian responses through the year.
Israel says it is building the barrier, which in many places runs east of the Green Line marking the pre-1967 war border, as a defence against suicide bombers. But the chairman of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Senegalese Ambassador Papa Louis Fall, told the Security Council recently it sealed off Palestinian communities and undermined the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state.
To assist the very poor, UNRWA plans to spend $62 million on creating 2.3 million work days for unemployed refugees through direct and indirect-hire job schemes. It will also spend $55 million on basic food commodities, targeting 222,000 families identified as too poor to provide for all their own needs. A major element in the appeal is $32.8 million to rehouse some of the more than 15,000 refugees whose homes have been demolished since the start of the strife. In addition, 16,000 shelters have been damaged.
The agency said growing poverty, violence and restricted freedom of movement had increased demand for UNRWA’s health services, with a 35 per cent drop in the proportion of infants below six months of age completing immunization programmes and home births rising sharply. It said it needed more medicines, funding for mobile medical teams to reach isolated communities and additional medical staff.