{"id":14989,"date":"2018-09-13T22:26:20","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T22:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=14989"},"modified":"2018-09-13T22:26:20","modified_gmt":"2018-09-13T22:26:20","slug":"syria-war-has-killed-more-than-360000-monitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=14989","title":{"rendered":"Syria war has killed more than 360,000: monitor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nGENEVA: The UN said that the situation in Gaza was \u201ccatastrophic\u201d after 11 years of \u201ceconomic siege\u201d and warned that Washington\u2019s decision to halt assistance to Palestinian refugees would create \u201cmore misery.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe situation in Gaza is becoming less and less livable,\u201d said Isabelle Durant, the deputy head of the UN development agency (UNCTAD).<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIt is catastrophic,\u201d she told reporters in Geneva.<\/p>\n

\nIn a new report, the UN agency said the Palestinian economy, long stifled by the Israeli occupation, was being hit hard by a sharp drop in international support to the Palestinians, even before Washington\u2019s dramatic cuts.<\/p>\n

\nLast year, international development assistance to the Palestinians shrunk by more than 10 percent compared to a year earlier.<\/p>\n

\nAnd at $720 million, it stood at just a third of the $2 billion received a decade earlier, the UNCTAD report showed.<\/p>\n

\nThat dramatic drop in support came before US President Donald Trump\u2019s government decided to completely halt its funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), which had previously stood at around $350 million a year.<\/p>\n

\nThe Trump administration has also scrapped around $200 million in payments by USAID to the Palestinians, and at the weekend said it would cut $25 million more in direct aid to six hospitals that primarily serve Palestinians in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

\nThe declining international support, coupled with \u201ca freeze in the reconstruction of Gaza and unsustainable credit-financed public and private consumption, paint a bleak picture for future growth,\u201d UNCTAD said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\nThe widespread restrictions on the movement of people and goods, confiscation of land and natural resources, and the accelerating expansion of Israeli settlements were also damaging, it said.<\/p>\n

\nWednesday\u2019s report slammed the shackling of the economy in the Palestinian territories, which are struggling with the world\u2019s highest unemployment rate \u2014 of more than 27 percent overall and around 44 percent in Gaza alone.<\/p>\n

\nWomen and youth are disproportionately impacted by the lack of jobs, it said, with half of Palestinians under the age of 30 out of work, while only 19 percent of women participate in the labor force.<\/p>\n

\nIn a report last year, the UN agency said that the Palestinian economy could easily double and that sky-high unemployment and poverty would plummet if the Israeli occupation were lifted.<\/p>\n

\nAnd in its latest report, UNCTAD suggested that simply removing some of the Israeli restrictions on Palestinian trade and investment could allow the territory\u2019s gross economy to swell by up to 10 percent.<\/p>\n

\nRemoving restrictions on Gaza was particularly important, UNCTAD said, warning that the Strip had been \u201creduced to a humanitarian case of profound suffering and aid dependency.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nMahmoud Elkhafif, who coordinates UNCTAD\u2019s Assistance to the Palestinian People Unit, said that the agency had not yet analyzed the impact the US cuts might have on the Palestinian economy, but stressed they would certainly result in \u201cmore misery\u201d in Gaza especially.<\/p>\n

\nIn 2012, UNCTAD warned that the area risked becoming \u201cuninhabitable\u201d by 2020 unless trends were reversed, but on Wednesday the agency said conditions \u201care worse\u201d than when they made that prediction.<\/p>\n

\nIn the past decade, Gaza has been subjected to three major military operations and a continuous and crippling air, sea and land blockade, which have \u201ceviscerated\u201d its productive capacity, it said.<\/p>\n

\nGaza\u2019s some 1.8 million residents currently count on average a real income per person that is 30 percent lower than in 2000.<\/p>\n

\nAnd Elkhafif pointed out that half of the people in the Strip were considered food-insecure even before the US announced its cuts to UNRWA, which provides aid to some 80 percent of the population.<\/p>\n

\nSimply lifting the blockade would quickly see its economic growth shoot up by a third, the report said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GENEVA: The UN said that the situation in Gaza was \u201ccatastrophic\u201d after 11 years of \u201ceconomic siege\u201d and warned that Washington\u2019s decision to halt assistance to Palestinian refugees would create \u201cmore misery.\u201d \u201cThe situation in Gaza is becoming less and less livable,\u201d said Isabelle Durant, the deputy head of the UN development agency (UNCTAD). \u201cIt…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":14990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}