SIX months after donors pledged billions of dollars for devastated Gaza, most of the money remains blocked, and reconstruction efforts are painfully slow, a coalition of aid groups said on Monday.
Their report also condemned the international community for failing to help open the blockaded Palestinian territories up to each other, to broker a lasting ceasefire with Israel and to hold the two sides accountable.
‘If we do not change course now to address these core issues the situation in Gaza will only continue to worsen,’ Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA) said.
‘Without economic, social and political stability, a return to conflict – and the cycles of damage and donor-funded reconstruction that accompany it – is inevitable,’ the coalition added.
The report comes six months after participants in the Cairo donor conference pledged about $5.4bn in aid for Gaza, flattened by a 50-day war that killed 2,200 Palestinians and 73 Israelis.
‘Six months later, reconstruction and rehabilitation have barely kicked off,’ said the report, written by major charities including CARE International, Oxfam, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council.
‘Donors should make good on the pledges made at the Cairo conference and move forward with reconstruction and recovery projects for Gaza,’ it said, adding that funding should immediately be made available to allow housing repairs.
According to the report, the war completely destroyed 12,400 houses and damaged over 160,000 homes.
Yet ‘there has been no accountability to address violations of international law, only 26.8 per cent of the money has been released, reconstruction and recovery have barely begun, and people in Gaza remain in dire straits,’ AIDA said.
The war displaced more than a quarter of Gaza’s population of 1.7 million and left 100,000 people homeless.
The report meanwhile urged Israel to allow Palestinians to freely move back and forth between the West Bank and Gaza, ‘in line with their obligations as an occupying power’.
‘The international community, in particular the Quartet of the US, the EU, Russia and the UN, should propose a time-bound plan to support an end to the blockade,’ AIDA added.
Meanwhile, heavy rain has flooded low-lying areas across the Gaza Strip, including Khazaa and Beit Hanoun where thousands of Gazans displaced by the Israeli offensive last summer are living in caravans.
Civil Defence spokesman Muhammad al-Midana said on Monday that a number of homes in the neighbourhood of Kunz Street and Shabia Street in Gaza City had been flooded, and that the Civil Defence had removed swamped cars inside the city and the northern Gaza Strip.
He also said that Civil Defence crews evacuated a school when water levels rose sharply in the surrounding area, putting the school at risk of flooding.
He said that there had been no reported injured.
Meanwhile, witnesses in the low-lying area of Khazaa east of Khan Younis said that a number of caravans housing displaced Gazans had been swamped. There were similar reports from Beit Hanoun.
Gaza has been hit by severe flooding in the past.
In December last year the UN’s Palestine refugee agency UNRWA declared a state of emergency in Gaza City when heavy rain shut down normal life in large parts of the coastal strip’s largest city.
A major storm left streets in Gaza City flooded with water and sewage, worsening the situation for more than 100,000 Palestinians left displaced by Israel’s offensive last summer.
UNRWA said: ‘The flooding is exacerbating the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza caused by blockade and the unprecedented destruction from the latest Israeli offensive.’
The year before, in December 2013, heavy rain caused the displacement of more than 40,000 across the Gaza Strip.
The floods are exacerbated by a chronic lack of fuel that limits how much water can be pumped out of flood-stricken areas.
The fuel shortages are a result of the eight-year-old Israeli blockade, in place since 2007, which also limits the import of other kinds of machinery related to pumping and sewage management that Gazans require to combat the floods.
l Israeli settlement farms in the occupied West Bank are using Palestinian child labour to grow, harvest and pack agricultural produce, much of it for export, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Monday.
The farms pay the children low wages and subject them to dangerous working conditions in violation of international standards.
The 74-page report, Ripe for Abuse: Palestinian Child Labour in Israeli Agricultural Settlements in the West Bank, documents that children as young as 11 are working on settlement farms.
The children carry heavy loads, are exposed to high temperatures and hazardous pesticides, and in some cases have to pay themselves for medical treatment for work-related injuries or illness.
‘Israel’s settlements are profiting from rights abuses against Palestinian children,’ said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch.
‘Children from communities impoverished by Israel’s discrimination and settlement policies are dropping out of school and taking on dangerous work because they feel they have no alternatives, while Israel turns a blind eye.’
Human Rights Watch interviewed 38 children and 12 adults who work on seven settlement farms in the Jordan Valley area, which covers about 30 per cent of the West Bank and where most large agricultural settlements are located.
The report said that Israel has allocated 86 per cent of the land in the Jordan Valley to settlements, and Palestinian poverty rates in the Jordan Valley are among the highest in the West Bank at 33.5 per cent.
The report called on Israel to dismantle the settlements and, in the meantime, prohibit settlers from employing children in accordance with Israel’s obligations under international treaties on children’s rights and labour rights.
Israeli and Palestinian development and labour rights groups estimate that hundreds of children work in Israeli agricultural settlements year-round, and that their numbers increase during peak harvesting times, the report said.
Virtually all the Palestinian children interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they felt they had no alternative but to find work on settlement farms to help support their families.
They said they had suffered nausea and dizziness. Some said they had passed out while working in summer temperatures that frequently exceed 40 degrees Celsius outdoors, and are even higher inside the greenhouses in which many children work.
Other children said they had experienced vomiting, breathing difficulties, sore eyes, and skin rashes after spraying or being exposed to pesticides, including inside enclosed spaces. Some complained of back pain after carrying heavy boxes filled with produce or ‘backpack’ containers of pesticide.
Israeli labour laws prohibit youth from carrying heavy loads, working in high temperatures, and working with hazardous pesticides, but Israel has not applied these laws to protect Palestinian children working in its settlements, the report said.
It added that Israeli authorities rarely inspect working conditions for Palestinians on Israeli settlement farms, and no authority has a clear mandate to enforce regulations.
Of the children interviewed for the report, 33 had dropped out of school and were working full-time on Israeli settlements, and of these, 21 had dropped out before completing the 10 years of basic education that are compulsory under Palestinian as well as Israeli laws.
‘So what if you get an education, you’ll wind up working for the settlements,’ one child said.
Teachers and principals at Palestinian schools in the Jordan Valley said that children who worked part-time on settlements during weekends and after school were often exhausted in class.
Israeli military authorities state that they do not issue work permits for Palestinians under 18 to work in settlements. However, Palestinians do not need Israeli work permits to reach the settlement farms, which are outside the gated areas of settlements that Palestinians need permits to enter, the report said.
All of the children and adults working for the settlement farms whom Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were hired by Palestinian middlemen working for Israeli settlers, were paid in cash, and did not receive pay-slips or have work contracts.
The report said that Israeli settlements export a substantial amount of their produce abroad, including to Europe and the United States.
Although the US Department of Labour maintains and publishes a list of more than 350 products from foreign countries that are produced with the use of forced labour or child labour in other countries, it has not included Israeli settlement products on the list, the report said.
It added that the US continues to grant preferential treatment to Israeli settlement products under the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement, and called on the US to revise the agreement to exclude settlement products.
