International community allocates one billion dollars in West Bank aid
Palestine, Economics, 4/29/2002

International donors meeting in Oslo last week pledged a total of US$ 1.2 billion in aid to the Palestinians to cover the most urgent humanitarian needs and help rebuild the West Bank. They agreed to grant 300 million dollars in emergency relief plus 900 million dollars to help rebuild infrastructure destroyed by Israel.

The pledged funds in Oslo would be in addition to one billion dollars already promised bythe Arab states and the European Union. The World Bank said the Palestinian Authority needs around two billion dollars to cover its essential needs this year.

The World Bank added it did not receive guarantees from Israel that infrastructure rebuilt with the funds would not be destroyed again. It warned Israel against destroying donor investments.

The UN relief agency UNRWA put the number of homeless in Jenin alone at some 4,000.

The US Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, Palestinian Minister Nabil Shaath, and World Bank official Nigel Roberts addressed Palestinian demands.

William Burns said "in order to make contributions that all of us are determined to provide to meet both immediate and longer term needs of the Palestinians, in order for this contributions to be meaningful it is important to have full and immediate access for humanitarian relief agencies, it is important to ease closures which have the effect of choking off economic life of the Palestinian towns now and undermining economic hope in the future."

It is also important to rebuild the civil institutions in a Palestinian authority as well as NGO's for Palestinians," he said.

Nabil Shaath, Palestinian Negotiator, on his part assessed the immediate humanitarian and rehabilitation needs at $300 million.

"That is somewhere in between our estimate of 470 and World Bank's estimate of 200. The community will not pay all the requirements but $300 will be an immediate amount in times of great need, particularly for the cities of Jenin and Nablus," Shaath said, adding "they are not all humanitarian in terms of food or something like that but they are also for the rehabilitation of the infrastructure, water, food sewage, schools and so on."

Worth noting that there are calls for the adoption of UN Security Council resolutions to have Israel pay compensations to the Palestinians for the damages it inflicted on public and private property. Also, some have expressed great concern over aid money flowing into Israeli companies "as a reward" for Israel's action rather than having Jordanian companies benefit from the Palestinian reconstruction efforts.

Previous Stories:
  UN development agency plans $400,000 emergency relief effort for palestinians   (4/26/2002)
  Moufaz: the war against the Palestinians shakes the Israeli economy   (4/24/2002)
  It would take three years for Palestinian economy to recover   (4/18/2002)

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