Palestinian official: Israel sends expired foods to Palestinian areas
Palestine-Israel, Economics, 7/1/1999

The Israeli military government and major Israeli food concerns have been deeply involved in attempts to market expired food in East Jerusalem and in the areas of the Palestine National Authority, a Palestinian official said recently.

Nidal Sadaqa, director of the Palestinian Food Supplies Department for the Jerusalem area, said that expired food supplies marked with the Israeli army stamp have been found in the markets of East Jerusalem after they were given a new casing to cover their real origin. He said that food supplies issued exclusively to the army are not sold in civilian markets, "But the fact that those army-stamped food cans were brought for sale in ccupied Jerusalem shows that the Israeli army is directly involved, or at least turns a blind eye."

He also blamed major Israeli food concerns and Jewish settlements "which stand behind a systematic campaign of flooding Palestinian markets in Occupied Jerusalem with expired food in order to poison the Palestinian population."

"The Jewish settlers," he said, "are not satisfied with their land theft campaign and want to eliminate the human presence of the Palestinians after they take over their land and destroy their heritage," said Sadaqa. He said his department had received numerous complaints from Palestinians living in Jerusalem's suburbs of having their shops flooded with expired food supplies. He noted that areas where consumer's inspectors have no access are usually the most flooded with expired food supplies.

Sadaqa is the head of the Jerusalem department in the PNA Ministry of Supplies. His job is basically to follow up the process of food marketing in the area of Jerusalem, which is beyond Israel's civil control mainly in the cluster of Arab villages that surround the Holy City. Those areas, defined as Area B in the Oslo Accords, are under Israel's military and security control while the PNA is in charge of civil affairs.

Sadaqa said the PNA ministry of supplies has been sending inspectors since the start of 1997 to shops in East Jerusalem's suburbs to check contents of supermarkets and major stores. At the beginning, he said, work was done randomly but as time passed by, well-trained personnel working for the ministry had joined the team and the whole inspection improved and became more efficient.

Sadaqa listed a number of products that are usually marketed after they expired such as powdered milk, canned food, fish, soft drinks, cleaning materials and some insect killers. He said that the presence of large amounts of such products in the Palestinian markets show that there is a systematic campaign to destroy the Palestinian population and to ruin their domestic economy.

He confirmed reports that appeared in the Palestinian press a few months ago that most of those expired products have come from Jewish settlements, mainly in the northern part of the West Bank where Israeli local factories re-cover the expired food cans and send them into the West Bank markets.

One day, he said, an Israeli lorry loaded with tons of meat drove into the West Bank city of Jenin and was spotted by Palestinian inspectors who suspected that something was wrong with his merchandise. Because of the Israeli identity of the driver, officers from the Palestinian-Israeli joint liaison office were summoned to handle the matter. The Israeli party to the liaison office questioned the driver briefly and released him after they ordered him to drive out of the PNA areas. Supplies Ministry inspectors did not like the way the driver was rapidly released and decided to chase the truck to its final destination. They finally reached East Jerusalem's suburbs where the driver stopped by a number of shops and distributed his expired meat without being hampered by any authority. When the lorry drove to West Jerusalem, the inspectors later reported to their superiors, Israeli inspectors prevented the driver from any further distribution of his goods and ordered him to return back to his factory.

Chocolate is one of the widely circulated goods, especially among children, and the Palestinian Ministry of Supplies is doing its best to bring to the awareness of those children the fact that they could fall victims of expired chocolate bars that originate in Israel. "It is not easy to explain to a child what an expiry date of a certain box of chocolate is. He might think you do not want him to have that piece of chocolate and therefore, you need a special approach and extra effort to convince him that some of those chocolate bars in the market are simply hazardous for his health," said Sadaqa.

To help achieve this mission, he said, the ministry held a number of exhibitions in West Bank towns where expired food was put on display for the public. Mobile exhibitions were also adopted in which ministry officials would tour schools and display to the students all sorts of expired food, along with detailed lectures on the dangerous effects of consuming expired food.

The other means the ministry uses to implement the rules, he said, is the threat to shut down a shop where expired food is sold and sometimes putting its owner on trial. Besides, he said, no goods are allowed any marketing in the Palestinian areas if they do not bear clear writings in Arabic showing what the ingredients are and what are the dates of product and expiration.

In short, he concluded, the fight with Israel has too many fronts and "poisoned food is not less dangerous that firearms. Sometimes, it is even more fatal."

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