On the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) last Thursday, agriculture minister Dr Mohammed Al-Agha strongly criticised international institutions for not exerting enough efforts to end the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip.
Agha sent an appeal to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
He urged them to immediately mobilise their agencies to help bail the besieged Gaza strip out of the current crises, and to break the two-year old repressive economic sanctions imposed by the Israeli occupation government and its international and regional allies with the aim to subjugate the Palestinians.
Agha said in a letter to OPEC chairman Ahamd Al-Sabah and to Allam Madyouf, the president of the UN’s FAO, that the Gaza Strip was experiencing an unprecedented crisis that hit all aspects of life, especially the agriculture sector among other vital sectors.
The Palestinian minister also said that tens of thousands of acres of agricultural lands and hundreds of artesian wells were destroyed by the Israeli bulldozers in addition to denying thousands of Palestinian fishermen their only source of income by Israeli gunboats that patrol the sea and shoot at the Palestinian fishing boats.
Describing the Israeli economic siege on Gaza as ‘the biggest criminal act that history had ever known’, Agha stressed that the Israeli decision of depriving the Strip of fuel supply was the act that most affected the lives of the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens living there.
Nevertheless, he stressed that Palestinians ‘will remain steadfast and resolute on our lands till the conscience of humanity wakes up, and till the Arab world mobilise their energies to rescind this oppressive and unjust blockade.
‘We are placing before you the real condition in the Gaza Strip, and we ask for no more than you mobilize to carry out your mandates as concerned organizations to save an Arab and a Muslim people being exterminated’, Agha stressed in his letter.