On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 7:30 AM, World View <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> wrote:
"Hope" convoy members: Egyptian authorities hinder
the arrival of aid to Gaza
19/05/2009
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk
CAIRO, (PIC)-- Dozens of participants in the European "Hope" convoy
expressed their outrage at the Egyptian authorities for preventing them from leaving the hotel they stay in and not facilitating the arrival of the convoy to the besieged Gaza Strip.
Greek participant Nicholas Kraxtin told Quds Press news agency on
Tuesday that the Egyptian authorities refused to allow the ship
carrying the aid convoy to unload its cargo at the port of Alexandria
and conditioned that the ship should dock at Port Said harbor.
He added that because of the ship's prior commitments, the convoy
organizers sought to hire another vessel, but the Egyptian authorities imposed new conditions.
The convoy was supposed to head from Port Said harbor on Tuesday
towards the Rafah border crossing after the participants had already
left Cairo for Port Said city, but the Egyptian authorities delay the
arrival of the convoy through the conditions they come up with every
time.
In another context, the UAE committee for charitable works in Gaza
received on Monday 13 ambulances and refrigerator trucks for
transporting blood and medicines in addition to a range of medical
equipment and supplies that had arrived through the Rafah crossing for distribution to Gaza hospitals.
Imad Al-Haddad, the director of the committee's office in Gaza,
said that the committee in the UAE through its offices in Britain and
Australia donated this medical aid to Gaza hospitals and would
distribute it in coordination with the health ministry in the Strip.
Haddad noted that this aid comes within a charitable campaign to
support Gaza established under the directives of UAE president Sheikh
Khalifa Al-Nahyan.
In the context of international efforts to support Gaza, the Irish
friendship society for the relief of Palestinian children handed out
cash assistance to a group of orphans sponsored by the assembly of
charitable institutions in Khan Younis.
The aid was distributed on Tuesday during a meeting attended by Dr.
Saber Al-Safati and his Irish wife, director of Al-Rahma charity
Mohamed Al-Masri and a representative from the government committee for the reception of delegations.
===
Committee against siege denounces Egypt for
blocking British medical team
11/05/2009
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk
GAZA, (PIC)-- The government committee against the siege has denounced
the Egyptian authority for not allowing a British medical team to cross the Rafah terminal into the Gaza Strip.
The committee issued a statement on Sunday saying that Cairo has been
blocking the British delegation from entering Gaza for five days.
It said that the team includes 12 British doctors of various origins,
recalling that it is the second of its kind to be sent by the Palestine International Medical Aid (Pima Palestine).
The delegation, grouping specialists, is carrying with it necessary
medical equipment needed in Gaza hospitals in addition to a number of
medicines, which the first delegation said were in shortage in the
Strip.
The statement said that the delegation that left Britain last Saturday
was stranded at the Rafah terminal's gates despite coordinating with
concerned authorities before its travel.
The committee urged the Egyptian authority to allow the team members
into Gaza to offer its health and humanitarian assistance to the
patients and citizens who have been trapped in the besieged Strip for
three years.
It hailed, in this respect, the Turkish premier Recep Erdogan for
demanding the opening of the Rafah crossing to allow necessary material to help rebuild the devastated Strip.
The committee finally asked the world community to pressure Israel into opening all Gaza commercial crossings.
===
Families Down to a Meal a Day
By Erin Cunningham
Inter Press Service
May 13, 2009
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46824
Um Abdullah cannot remember the last time she was able to feed meat to her eight children. She does know that for the past week the single meal she cooked for them each day consisted only of lentils. And that on one day, she had received aid coupons from the United Nations, which she subsequently sold to buy tomatoes and eggplant at the local market.
Um Abdullah is a 42-year-old dressmaker and hails from Jabaliya, a cramped refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City.
Stories like hers are commonplace across the Gaza Strip, where years of sanctions, siege and now war have battered the territory's economy and put many essentials out of reach for the majority of the population.
"We live day to day, nothing more," says Um Abdullah, who made less than three dollars in profit over the last three days. "If we can eat once a day, that is good enough for us."
While the prices of food and other goods have cooled off from
the record highs they hit during Israel's three-week assault, the World Food Programme (WFP) reports that a number of items, many of them basic, remain more expensive for Gaza's residents than they were before Operation Cast Lead.
Sugar, rice, onion, cucumber, tomato, lemon, pepper, chicken, meat, fish and garlic were all more expensive for Gaza's residents in March 2009 than they were in December 2008, the WFP says.
The price of pepper per kilogram doubled, while the cost of onions jumped 33 percent. Fresh chicken is now 43 percent more expensive than before the war, a result of the destruction of a number of poultry farms across Gaza throughout the assault.
The decimation of wide swathes of agricultural land, as well as cattle and sheep farms, has added to Gaza's growing food insecurity.
But the war only intensified an already dire humanitarian situation, economists say, which has its roots in Israel's economic siege that hermetically sealed Gaza's borders in June 2007.
The shortage of all but "essential" goods and a flow of only a trickle of fuel have sent prices of food and other products skyrocketing over the past two years, making them unaffordable to many households in the Gaza Strip.
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the food portion of Gaza's consumer price index (CPI) - an economic indicator used to measure the average price of goods and services purchased by households - rose 28 percent in 2008.
In Israel, by comparison, the CPI's food segment increased by less than 5 percent from March 2008 to March 2009, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics reports.
"A negative economic growth rate coupled with an extreme shortage of goods is causing what we call stagflation in Gaza and that is what is behind the high prices," says Dr. Ibrahim Hantash of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.
"The rampant smuggling also sends prices of basic goods through the roof, because there is no control. It's all black market."
After the war, the majority of Gazans are now living below the income poverty line, says the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It defines the line as a family of six subsisting on 500 dollars per month.
More than half of those families living below the poverty are living in extreme hardship, on less than 250 dollars each month, or
approximately 1.35 dollars per person per day.
And because Gaza's households spend most of their dwindling monthly income on food, the IMF says, 75 percent of the population has been forced to reduce the quantity of food they buy, while 89 percent reduced the quality.
This has meant many households, like Um Abdullah's, have had to forego certain sources of protein, including meat and eggs.
"Gazans face an acute shortage of nutritious, locally-produced and affordable food," says a report released by the WFP and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in March.
Gazans have consequently reduced their daily calorie intake, mainly by no longer eating items like red meat, rice, oils and fats, and fruits and dairy products – leading to nutritional deficiencies like anaemia, the report says.
Jalal Ataf Al-Masari has been running a fruit stand at the heart of the crowded Beach refugee camp in Gaza City for ten years, and he says he has never seen prices so high and business so low.
"At the beginning of the siege, it was only the poor that stopped buying fruit," Al-Masari says. "Now, nobody buys fruit. Life has become increasingly worse."
One kilo of bananas at Al-Masari's shop is six shekels, or 1.45 dollars. Apples, imported from Israel, are five shekels, or 1.20 dollars per kilo. Before the siege, Al-Masari says, you could buy three kilos of apples for 10 shekels, or 2.42 dollars.
Now, not even pears, peaches or kiwis are available in the market. Many of Gaza's "supermarkets" contain sparsely stocked shelves of UN-distributed rice, EU-donated cooking oil, some canned goods and plastic bags of flour, salt and lentils.
"I have been dealing with this siege for two years and I still can't believe how expensive everything is," Al-Masari says. "It's more expensive than America."
The WFP says Gaza's residents are resorting to certain "coping mechanisms" to keep their families afloat, including selling jewellery
or property, buying food on credit, and borrowing from friends and family.
Soha Kaloub, mother of eight and wife of a civil policeman whose salary has been cut off by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, says from her bare home in the Beach refugee camp that they were forced to sell off all their furniture in order to buy food.
Kaloub cannot afford to fill her six-kilogram canister of cooking gas, which would cost her about six dollars, so she uses a small kerosene cooker left over from the era of the Ottoman rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
She uses it to cook beans or lentils, sometimes vegetables, for her children. "For nine months, we haven't had meat or chicken. My refrigerator is empty, our lives our empty," Kaloub says. "It wasn't paradise before the siege, but it was better. At least we had
something."
*********************************************************************
WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE
To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/
<http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/>
Need some good karma? Appreciate the service?
Please consider donating to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@yahoo.com for instructions.
To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:wvns-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:wvns-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--
Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment