AN United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman, said yesterday that the UN organisation is stopping food supplies to the Gaza Strip because of fuel shortages.
The spokesman added that UNRWA had used up its fuel reserves; consequently, it is being forced to stop the distribution of food supplies to around 1.5 million people residing in the Gaza Strip.
Residents have often described the Gaza Strip as one big prison. Now they add that it is more like a concentration camp since they are being bombed and shelled very day, and now they are starving, the new victims of a new holocaust.
One resident said: ‘We do not have gas, diesel oil, or petrol. This is not all. We have a naval blockade by an Israeli frigate. It is preventing us from going into the sea and fishing.’
Israel is imposing a siege on around 1.5 million human beings in a space that does not exceed 360 square kilometres, while the whole world is watching.
Israel is also depriving the people of food and medicine.
Now UNRWA, which operates under the umbrella of the United Nations has issued a loud, practical warning by announcing a halt to its supply of food aid to the Gaza Strip because it had used up the fuel needed by its cars.
It is expected, for the same reason, that its educational programmes and social services will be abandoned.
UNRWA’s failure to supply Gaza with food reminds the Palestinians of the failure of the United Nations, as well as the whole world, to make Israel adhere to international resolutions related to Palestinians rights and independence.
Adnan Abu-Hasanah, the UNRWA media adviser, in Gaza said yesterday that UNRWA will no longer be able to provide food supplies to 650,000 Palestinian refugees.
He added that this will also have an impact on hundreds of UNRWA employees, who include doctors, social workers, and others, who move around Gaza to provide aid to 1 million Palestinian refugees.
Therefore, relief programmes will be ‘severely hurt’ unless UNRWA receives the required amounts of fuel to operate their vehicles this evening.
Under international law the operations of UN bodies are protected but Israel ignores international law.
Abu-Hasanah says: ‘Yes, we always speak about international law. We always say this to the Israeli side and the United Nations.’
He added that Robert Kerry, representative of the UN secretary general, and UNRWA officials, including Karen Abu Zayd, have talked about this with absolute clarity.
He adds: ‘We are an organisation that has immunity. We were established based on a UN General Assembly resolution.’
He adds that UNRWA also has an agreement with Israel and the PNA to operate freely to be able to offer relief services to more than 1 million refugees in the Gaza Strip, who are totally dependent on UNRWA.
He adds that UNRWA now seems to have become one part of the major problem faced by the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Abu-Hasanah says that UNRWA, by this evening will have been forced to stop all UN services, since the oil will have run out.
This means, as Abu-Hasanah puts it, that ‘the problem will exacerbate, on all levels, because we are talking about a completely devastated economic sector, enormous unemployment, and unprecedented poverty in this crowded and dangerous part of the world.’
Abu-Hasanah also says that there are contacts with the Israeli side to end to try the problem.
However the real problem is that the US and UK governments support the Zionist siege of Gaza and are not moved by the sight of starving people and hungry children.
They view this sight as a weapon to be used against Hamas, and the Palestinian revolution to aid Israel to achieve its aims.
Meanwhile, Ismail Haniya, the premier of the PNA Palestinian National Authority caretaker government in Gaza, expressed his hope last Saturday, at the opening of the sixth conference for Palestinians in Europe, that the Palestinian people would not remain displaced in exile and refugee camps for much longer.
The conference kicked off under the slogan ‘60 years, and the return is nearer’ and was organised by the General Secretariat of the Palestinians in Europe conference, the Palestinian Return Centre, the Palestinian Forum in Denmark, together with other Palestinian institutions in Denmark to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (usurpation of Palestine by Zionist gangs) and to reaffirm adherence to their right of return.
He said: ‘We are following the activities and events you organise and there is no doubt that they have a great impact because you act in a region of great influence.’
Haniya added that the Nakba anniversary renews the memory of the great injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people.
The premier underlined that the motives of the Israeli siege is political and aimed at forcing the Palestinian people to make concessions especially on the right of return, vowing that his government would never relinquish the Palestinian rights and constants.
Before receiving a standing ovation from the attendees, the premier highlighted that the occupation will come to an end because it is oppression and the future is for the Palestinian people, adding that no one in the world, no matter how strong and powerful he is, can extract the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
The Hamas movement followed up Saturday’s conference by declaring on Monday that the repeated meetings between PNA (Palestinian National Authority) chief Mahmud Abbas and Israeli premier Ehud Olmert were a waste of time.
Fawzi Barhum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said in a press release that the meetings were held in response to American orders to market capitulatory projects drawn up by the Bush administration.
He charged that the meetings further targeted gaining time through pre-occupying Palestinian and international public opinion, while the Zionist-American projects are being implemented, topped by the endorsement of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ on the usurped land of Palestine, after liquidating the Palestinian people’s rights.
Barhum warned that the ‘difficult, complicated and catastrophic conditions’ of the Palestinian people especially in the Gaza Strip might be exploited to implement such projects.
The spokesman asked Abbas to learn the lesson and to benefit from his experience and that of the late PNA leader Yasser Arafat to discover the danger of such schemes, and to put an end to the series of failures in negotiations with the occupation.
He advised Abbas to start a new stage of boosting internal Palestinian conditions and decision-making and to forge national unity to confront challenges threatening the Palestinian cause.
• Israel late yesterday made a last-minute provision of fuel to the UNRWA aid agency in the Gaza Strip, which now has enough fuel to last about 20 days.
‘We have managed to pull back from the brink, but it is entirely unacceptable that a humanitarian and human resources organisation like UNRWA should have been pushed to the brink in the first place, an UNRWA spokesman said.
