GENEVA, 8 June 2004 — United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday called on the international community to do more to help impoverished Palestinian refugees both in the Palestinian Territories and in other countries across the Middle East.
“The Palestine refugees continue to struggle to cope with increased socio-economic hardship, and are grappling with painful uncertainty about the future,” said Annan in a message delivered to a conference on the issue in Geneva.
The two-day conference is jointly hosted by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) and the Swiss government to discuss the plight of more than 4 million registered Palestinian refugees.
“Since September 2000, the number of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who rely on UNRWA for food aid has risen from 130,000 to 1.1 million — an almost ten-fold increase,” said Annan.
“In that same time period, the percentage of Palestinians living below the poverty line has tripled, from 20 percent to 60 percent,” he added. “As if this sharply growing distress was not enough, recent months have seen a deeply troubling upsurge in violence,” remarked Annan, pointing to recent Israeli military operations in the Rafah refugee camps in Gaza.
“Indeed, at times the conflict has appeared at risk of spiraling out of control, necessitating a clear response from the international community,” the UN leader said.
Annan’s message was delivered to the conference by UNWRA Commissioner General Peter Hansen. Some 350 representatives from 62 countries and 29 international organizations are expected to attend the conference, which opened Monday.
Conference organizers said the meeting would for the most part focus on the difficult conditions facing the refugees and how to alleviate their problems, rather than discussing the wider political issues.
The United Nations said Israeli Army restrictions on movement in the Palestinian territories could prevent tens of thousands of pupils from sitting their high-school finals, which began yesterday.
Ten UN agencies working in the West Bank and Gaza issued a joint statement appealing to Israeli authorities to facilitate “these important and future-defining exams.”
“Failure to sit for these exams will result in forfeiting the entire school year,” warned the local head of the UN agency for children (UNICEF), David Bassiouni. “Students will not be able to study in universities and they will be forced to repeat their studies next year,” he added.
According to Khaled Abdelshafi, head of the UN Development Program (UNDP) in Gaza, “the recent (Israeli) incursions in Rafah have had a detrimental effect on the economy of the area, with substantial damages to infrastructure.”
“To add this restriction of preventing the schoolchildren from writing these exams to the already volatile equation will seriously stifle our efforts to attain human development in the area. “It’s like adding insult to injury,” he said.
He was referring to large-scale army raids last month in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah that left some 60 Palestinians dead and scores of houses destroyed in an army hunt for tunnels used to smuggle in weapons from Egypt. The United Nations estimates that almost 60,000 Palestinian children out of the 1.2 million children of school age will sit for their high-school finals, known as tawjihi, this year.
In Rafah alone, more than 3,000 schoolchildren are scheduled to take the weeklong exams. Statistics released early last week showed that nearly 1,500 school days were lost and pass rates in UN-run schools sharply declined in 2003 2004.
Meanwhile, Palestinians voiced dismay yesterday at Israel’s decision to put off any withdrawal from the Gaza Strip until at least the spring of next year, saying they wanted to see action rather than words.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Cabinet approved on Sunday the principle of withdrawing from the Palestinian territory but, as part of a compromise formula, stipulated that no pullouts would begin until March 2005 and each phase would be subject to separate votes in Cabinet.
Sharon’s Palestinian counterpart Ahmed Qorei said he was “very sorry” about the wording of the revised disengagement plan. “At first they spoke about removing all the settlements and now they ignore the settlements issue. At first they spoke about the date and now there is no date for a withdrawal,” he told reporters after a Cabinet meeting in Ramallah.
