UN Palestine relief agency ready with rehabilitation drive once conditions improve

Calling attention to an “unprecedented scale of suffering” being endured by Palestinians, the head of the main United Nations agency helping them said preparations have been made to launch a rehabilitation programme but this can only happen once conditions are stabilized.

At a press briefing in New York, the Commissioner-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Karen AbuZayd, painted a grim picture of the humanitarian crisis gripping Gaza. She residents there were “trapped in what they consider a nightmare and all they really want is to return to normality, to a decent life for themselves and their children.”

She blamed a combination of factors, including financial sanctions against the Hamas-led Government, the 10-week siege of Gaza, and Israel’s daily targeted killings of suspected militants and incursions into densely populated neighbourhoods which were “causing terror among the civilian populations.”

The economy has been ruined by the “strangulation” of commerce and trade, she said, bringing the institutions of Government “to a point of near meltdown.”

These pressures have not fostered a desire for compromise on the part of the Government or the people “or yet – yet – the fall of the Government, but rather have created mass despair, anger and a sense of hopelessness and abandonment,” she said.

Citing her personal experience working in the region, she said there is currently an “unprecedented scale of suffering that really innocent people are enduring” and pointed to “the need to bring that to an end as soon as possible.”

Gaza’s 1.4 million residents “deserve some form of protection from the international community,” she added.

Ms. AbuZayd welcomed growing recognition by some governments of the need for change. For its part, UNRWA was prepared to embark on rehabilitation when the situation stabilizes. “UNRWA is ready with a major development programme to rehabilitate crowded refugee camp areas, reconstruct houses to build more school buildings… once the conditions are right,” she said.

“We would much rather be building those than handing out emergency food, especially when we have such high unemployment [which is] particularly dangerous among the youth,” she added.

“However unrealistic it appears sometimes amidst all this gloom, we have to do something to give hope, both humanitarian and political hope, so that people understand there is light at the end of the tunnel.”