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Gaza: Money that doesn't talk
Written by: DARA
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A Palestinian woman stands beside her destroyed home in Izbet Abed Rabou in northern Gaza. Stuart Reigeluth/DARA
This blog is written by Ricardo Solé, Deputy Director of DARA. Ricardo has extensive operational field experience in humanitarian aid, coordination, planning and evaluation. Having held senior positions in the World Health Organisation and the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office, he has worked throughout the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. "We need players, not payers" - This was the reproach that one western diplomat still remembers from his latest needs-assessment visit to the Gaza Strip. Gazans see themselves as victims of a political game, where the ambiguity of western diplomacy seems to have no answers to the suffering of the civilian population. The 1.4 million men, women and children who were not allowed to flee the Israeli bombing in January are trapped in this tiny enclave. Unable to visit relatives, attend funerals or weddings outside the Strip, and with limited medical treatment, the sense of despair is palpable. "This is the biggest jail in the world," says a student of the American School in Gaza, destroyed by the Israeli bombs. The occupied Palestinian territories are among the largest per capita recipients of aid in the world. But for many in Gaza, western aid is merely an alibi for lack of political action. "We don't die here, but this is no life," is how one young Palestinian woman put it to me. Over the past 5 years, I have visited the Palestinian territories at least twice a year. What strikes me most is the feeling that things are always able to get worse. Gaza is almost overflowing with aid, but people feel ignored. "We've been abandoned like dogs. No one comes here. No one bothers to ask us what we need," says Abu Khadr, one of the dwindling numbers of residents at the Izbet Abed Rabou tent camp near Jabalia in northern Gaza. The tents have been erected on rubble with no running water, toilets, electricity or gas. Many of Abu's former neighbours have been forced to move into the already cramped accommodation of family or friends. Unchallenged Israeli border restrictions mean that there's almost nothing to rebuild the 8000 homes destroyed during the conflict. "The biggest challenge of all is access. Access of people and commodities into Gaza," says the Country Director of Save the Children UK, Salam Kanaan. Her organisation is one of 50 aid agencies that DARA has interviewed about the support they receive from wealthy government donors. In 2003, 23 of these donors including the US, EU, Canada, Australia and most governments of Europe, agreed that their funding of humanitarian aid should be impartial, neutral and independent from political, economic or military objectives. Here in Gaza or even the West Bank, these Good Humanitarian Donorship principles seem a long way from being fulfilled. "We have been calling all the time for improved access and I think donors can really support in that," says Salam Kanaan. Our interviews with aid agencies on the ground suggest that that support has often been weak or non existent. Israel currently lets in between 100 and 200 trucks a day. The UN says it needs 500. And it's not just a question of quantity as your nose will tell you on a trip down to the wetlands of Wadi Gaza. The stench of raw sewage being pumped into the Mediterranean is almost unbearable. The Israeli ban on pipes or cement coming into Gaza, for supposed security reasons, has contributed to the near collapse of the sewage system. Under their agreed principles, donors are supposed to support the return of those affected by crisis to normal lives and livelihoods. But with no possibility of development, Gaza's economy and its people are going backwards. More than 80 percent of the population is now dependent on food aid. Officials of donor governments wonder whether the Good Humanitarian Donorship principles their governments signed up to six years ago can ever be applied to this intractable dispute. Our conclusions will have to await the publication of DARA's Humanitarian Response Index this November. Yet there is perhaps a glimmer of hope. A new leadership in the US is opening the door for more coherent diplomacy and the Good Humanitarian Donorship principles are back on the agenda... Maybe next year I'll be able to write something a little more positive. Click here to watch a video of DARA's visit to Gaza and the West bank.
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2 responses to “Gaza: Money that doesn't talk”
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25 Apr 2009 11:50:58 GMT
This report is so one-sided...where are all the Arab countries with petro-dollars...do not see them helping their ''brethren'' !!
26 Apr 2009 10:31:57 GMT
To Mortimer. That is wrong. Quatar, if I remember correctly, is one of the biggest Donors. However, it is the "pledges" made in public and never fulfilled, (US?) or the "behind the scenes" political based interference that adds to the horror.
The Gaza siege has now lasted 22 months. There is food and relief rotting outside the crossing points. What is criminal, is to stop 1'500'000 people getting access to the help that is already there. They can't leave, there is not enough water,and they can't subsist on what is available (18% of arable land in Gaza was either destroyed or declared part of the "shoot to kill" zone).. What Israel intends is also clear - but no one has had the courage to say it. The article above is not "one sided" but is possibly guilty of over-optimism.