Oxfam: Rebuilding Gaza will take more than a century

[Falcon29]

Oxfam: Rebuilding Gaza will take more than a century

Reconstructing the Gaza Strip will take more than a century if the Israeli siege on the Strip is not lifted, the London-based charity Oxfam warned today.

"At current rates it could take more than 100 years to complete essential building of homes, schools and health facilities in Gaza unless the Israeli blockade is lifted," Oxfam said in a statement.

It said that new figures show the amount of vital construction materials entering Gaza dropped last month. "Less than 0.25 per cent of the truckloads of essential construction materials needed have entered Gaza in the past three months," the statement noted.

"Six months since the end of the conflict, the situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly desperate," Oxfam said, calling for an urgent end to the blockade which has now been in place for nearly eight years.

The leading international charity said Gaza needs more than 800,000 truckloads of construction materials to build homes, schools, health facilities and other infrastructure required after repeated conflicts and years of blockade.

"Yet, in January only 579 such trucks entered Gaza," it said, "this is even less than the 795 trucks that entered the previous month."

Oxfam pointed out: "Around 100,000 people - more than half of them children - are still living in shelters, temporary accommodation or with extended family after their homes were destroyed. Tens of thousands more families are living in badly damaged homes."

"Only an end to the blockade of Gaza will ensure that people can rebuild their lives. Families have been living in homes without roofs, walls or windows for the past six months," Oxfam's Regional Director Catherine Essoyan said.

She added: "Many have just six hours of electricity a day and are without running water. Every day that people are unable to build is putting more lives at risk. It is utterly deplorable that the international community is once again failing the people of Gaza when they need it most."

'No progress' in talks

The statement said that there has been no progress on substantive talks on a long-term solution to the crisis in Gaza, which were supposed to happen after the ceasefire.

"Oxfam calls on both sides to proactively seek a peaceful resolution, including an end to the Israeli blockade which remains firmly in place and continues to have a devastating impact on people in Gaza."

"Under the blockade, exports of agricultural produce from Gaza have fallen in the last year to just 2.7 per cent of the level before the blockade was imposed. Fishermen are still restricted to an enforced fishing limit of six nautical miles – far short of where most fish are – farmers are restricted from accessing much of the most fertile farmland."

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[Schutz]

Well lets not say a century and say never, if the "siege" is never lifted.

 

[Falcon29]

How a war criminal can veto aid to Gaza | The Electronic Intifada

Has an Israeli war criminal been given a veto on what aid may enter Gaza?

Earlier this week, I wrote about how Yoav Mordechai, a major-general who took part in the 2009 attack against Gaza, had been invited to the European Parliament. Following complaints by Palestine solidarity activists and some of the parliament’s own members, Mordechai’s scheduled appearance was canceled at the last minute yesterday.

He did, however, meet representatives of the European Union’s 28 governments.

It is both grotesque and logical for these diplomats to host Mordechai.

It is grotesque because doing so conferred a degree of respectability on his crimes against humanity. It is logical because the EU is the largest provider of aid to the Palestinians and Mordechai oversees the delivery and distribution of that aid.

At an October 2014 conference in Cairo, the EU promised to cough up €450 million ($514 million) to help Gaza be rebuilt after Israel had bombed it for almost seven weeks in July and August.

That money is being funneled through a “reconstruction mechanism” set up by the United Nations, the Palestinian Authority and an Israeli military body called COGAT, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. As the current head of COGAT, Mordechai has been directly involved in establishing this mechanism.

COGAT is being given personal data on every recipient of aid. It can refuse entry to aid, if it so wishes.

No remorse
If a known arsonist set your house on fire — and never expressed the slightest remorse for doing so — would you task him with repairing the damage?

Mordechai was a battalion commander with the Golani Brigade, an infantry unit in the Israeli military, during the January 2009 assault.

He can be compared to the putative arsonist. Evidence collected by human rights monitors indicate that troops under his command, or with whom he worked closely, used white phosphorous, a weapon that inflicts horrific burns on its victims.

Six years ago, Mordechai helped to destroy Gaza. Without ever demonstrating the slightest remorse for that war crime, he is now part of an international team determining how somewhere he tried to destroy should be rebuilt.

COGAT handles many aspects of the day-to-day administration of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

In enforcing the siege imposed since 2007, it has been dictating what may enter Gaza long before it was given a kind of UN imprimatur through the so-called Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism. (The imprimatur, it should be stressed, does not alter the fact that the siege is illegal; subjecting a civilian population to collective punishment is prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention.)

Groveling
Bizarrely, COGAT has been trying to spin its activities as humanitarian. A brochure available on its website boasts of how COGAT approved 235 projects in Gaza that “provide employment opportunities, as well as improve the quality of living for residents.”

Nowhere in its sixteen pages does the brochure acknowledge that many of these projects had been damaged severely by Israeli troops. That is despite the fact that the projects listed include al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, which was attacked by the Givati Brigade, another infantry division. Nor does it acknowledge that the catastrophic damage to the Gaza economy, including mass unemployment, is the direct consequence of Israel’s siege.

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Well lets not say a century and say never, if the "siege" is never lifted.

Consequences come with oppressive policies. These consequences don't have to come from the Palestinians. They will come by the world. Israel's policies, culture and actions have demonized the Jewish people. It's a trend that is now irreversible. Educated, good Jews(if they exist) should take this into consideration. In the long term this could spell a large rebellion that could drag world into chaos. Nobody wants the shit to hit the fan but with this ongoing oppressive cynical cycle and Jewish sponsored militarizing of Western police we are heading towards that roads.

Here's 'most moral army of world' supported directly by Western powers:

Of course just 'collateral damage' as Jews would tell us.

 

[salmanACCA]

once we are done with Israel there will be nothing left for rebuilding

 

[Falcon29]

 Advertisement

The next war will break out in the summer. Israel will give it another childish name and it will take place in Gaza. There’s already a plan to evacuate the communities along the Gaza Strip border.

Israel knows this war will break out, it also knows why – and it’s galloping toward it blindfolded, as though it were a cyclic ritual, a periodical ceremony or a natural disaster that cannot be avoided. Here and there one even perceives enthusiasm.

It doesn’t matter who the prime minister is and who the defense minister is – there’s no difference between the candidates as far as Gaza is concerned. Isaac Herzog and Amos Yadlin are saying nothing of course, and Tzipi Livni is boasting that thanks to her no port was opened in Gaza. The rest of the Israelis aren’t interested in Gaza’s fate either and soon it will be forced to remind them again of its disaster in the only way left to it, the rockets.

Gaza’s disaster is dreadful. No mention of it is made in the Israeli discourse and certainly not in the most dumbed down, hollow election campaign there’s ever been here. It’s hard to believe, but Israelis have invented a parallel reality, cut off from the real one, a callous, unfeeling, denying reality, while all this adversity, most of it of their own making, is taking place a short distance from their homes. Babies are freezing to death under the debris of their homes, youths risk their lives and cross the border fence just to get a food portion in an Israeli lock up. Has anyone heard of this? Does anyone care? Does anyone understand that this is leading to the next war?

Salma lived only 40 days, like the eternity of a butterfly. She was a baby from Beit Hanoun on the northeast of the Gaza Strip, who died last month of hypothermia, after her tiny body froze in the wind and rain that penetrated into the plywood-and-plastic hut she has been living in with her family, since their house was bombed.

“She was frozen like ice cream,” her mother said of the last night of her infant’s life. UNWRA Spokesman Chris Gunness wrote about Salma last in week in the British newspaper the Guardian. Mirwat, her mother, told him that when she was born she weighed 3.1 kilograms. Her three–year– old sister, Ma’ez, is hospitalized due to frostbite.

Ibrahim Awarda, 15, who lost his father in an Israeli bombardment in 2002, was more fortunate. He decided to cross the fence between Gaza and Israel. “I knew I’d be arrested,” he told the New York Times reporter in Gaza last week. “I told myself, maybe I’ll find a better life. They gave me good food and then threw me back.”

Ibrahim was held for about a month in two prisons in Israel before being tossed back to the destruction, squalor, hunger and death. Three hundred Gazans drowned in the sea last September, in a desperate attempt to leave the prison Strip. Eighty-four Gazans were arrested by the Israel Defense Forces in the last six months after trying to enter Israel, most of them just to flee from the hell they live in. Nine more were arrested this month.

Atiya al-Navhin, 15, also tried to enter Israel in November, just to escape his fate. He was shot by IDF soldiers, treated in two Israeli hospitals and returned to Gaza in January. Now he’s lying paralyzed and unable to speak in his home.

Some 150,000 homeless people live in Gaza and about 10,000 refugees in UNRWA shelters. The organization’s budget was spent after the world totally ignored its commitment to contribute $5.4 billion to rebuild Gaza. The commitment to negotiate lifting the blockade on Gaza – the only way to avoid the next war and the one after it – has also been broken. Nobody talks about it. It’s not interesting. There was a war, Israelis and Palestinians were killed in it for nothing, let’s move on to the next war.

Israel will again pretend to be surprised and offended – the cruel Arabs are attacking it with rockets again, for no reason.

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once we are done with Israel there will be nothing left for rebuilding

I am losing patience with Arab/Muslim world. They need to open the borders for us and allow us to respond this atrocity. We want to declare Jihad on Israel even if all Western nations came to support Israel's injustice. We will go to world war if it has to be that way. Enough cowardliness and hesitiation from our leaders, these are people who hate us and hate Muslim children and we can defend ourselves if given an opportunity.

 

[500]

LOL they simply want more billions to suck. If u check Gaza destruction pics they are all closeups. Total number of destroyed buildings is tiny (outskirts of Shujaiya neighborhood).

Destroyed Gaza:

 

[Falcon29]

Photos from livestream in central Gaza city in June(Why am I not surprised). Since not all 2.1 million residents are dead, 500 is suggesting there is no destruction in Gaza nor any humantarian crisis.

UN chief: Gaza destruction 'beyond description,' worse than last war - Diplomacy and Defense - Israel News | Haaretz

Warning on funds, UN doubles estimate of destroyed Gaza homes | Maan News Agency

JERUSALEM (AFP) -- The UN warned Thursday it was running out of funds to house families in Gaza, as it doubled its estimate of the number of homes damaged or destroyed in this summer's war with Israel.

"Unless the situation changes urgently, we will run out of funds in January, meaning we will not be able to provide rental subsidies to many affected families nor provide the support required to carry out repairs," said Robert Turner, the operations director for the UNRWA Palestinian refugee agency.

He said more than 96,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in the 50-day war, more than twice the UN's original estimate.

Based on satellite imagery and preliminary field work immediately after the war, "we estimated about 42,000 refugee family shelters had been affected by the war," he said.

"We now know that over 96,000 homes were damaged or destroyed."

Turner said more than 7,000 homes were completely lost, affecting some 10,000 families. An additional 89,000 homes were damaged, about 10,000 of them severely.

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User 500 is also painting this as a ploy for money. Even though all money goes to Israel and it's distribution is controlled by IDF major.

 

[500]

I dont know why German and Japanese cities which were almost completely flattened took couple years to rebuilt, but Gaza with some outskirt destruction needs 100 years.

This destruction footage might look impressive at first glance:

But all of it is taken in this red square:

 

[Falcon29]

Yes I'm sure all 360 of these factories were destroyed in that little square too.

Gaza counts cost of war as more than 360 factories destroyed or damaged | World news | The Guardian

And that Rafah, Beit Hanoun, Khuzaa, Jabiliya were never attacked.

Butchery in Rafah. The dead are kept in vegetable refrigerators | Middle East Eye

Abu Taha, a farmer in Rafah, opened the refrigerator he normally keeps his potatoes and carrots in. In it were the corpses of children, young men and women lying on top of one another, soaked in blood. Many were impossible to identify and only a few have been placed in white burial shrouds.

Such was the savagery of Israel's bombardment in Rafah, such was the quantity of dead bodies, that there was simply no other option but to use vegetable refrigerators as makeshift morgues. The closure of hospitals which came under bombardment led to a cascade of corpses. It started when medical staff were forced to abandon Rafah's main hospital Abu Yousef al-Najjar which came under constant bombardment by artillery shelling from the east of the city.

They evacuated the injured to Kuwaiti Hospital, a facility totally ill-equipped to deal with major trauma injuries from the extended battlefield that the Gaza Strip has become. Even so, several bodies were left lying on the roads, bleeding for hours without any ambulance crew arriving to rescue them.

Meanwhile, three ambulance crew members have been killed, their bodies were unidentifiable after they were hit by an Israeli tank shell directed at their ambulance. Several of the cases close to the hospital gate were not reachable by rescue teams, says Abu Ahmed, an ambulance driver. “Each time, I drive through tank shells are fired nearby,” he says while he is a couple of hundred meters from tens of victims bleeding on the road.

Most cases of those killed in Rafah are civilians slain by canon shells that wiped several homes in Hay al-Junina area. Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes fired missiles on several homes in Rafah targeting homes of Abu Suliman, Zorb, Alshaer, and Abu Suliman. The death toll in Rafah in the past 24 hours is now 110 killed and hundreds injured. Medics say there are more bodies they could not reach.

The corpses were taken into vegetables refrigerators in Rafah, which have their own electricity generators. Even burying the dead was full of hazard, as the cemetries in the east of the city have also been under Israeli artillery shelling over the past 24 days.

“We had no option but to put the bodies of tens killed in the refrigerators,” Subhi Radwan, mayor of Rafah told MEE.

Al-Nujjar hospital has only enough beds for a few dozen patients, but evacuation has meant nowhere else to go for victims of the attack.

Radwan says, the war on Rafah is not over, and his staff members are unable to offer any facilities to people on the ground, that includes water and electricity lines which were destroyed by strikes.

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[captainvancouver]

Here's an idea. Stop shooting rockets at Israel and then Israel will stop bombing Gaza.

 

[haman10]

If u check Gaza destruction pics they are all closeups.

Doesn't look like a close-up to me :

Expect us .

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

I dont know why German and Japanese cities which were almost completely flattened took couple years to rebuilt, but Gaza with some outskirt destruction needs 100 years.

This destruction footage might look impressive at first glance:

But all of it is taken in this red square:

View attachment 196964

Because they got a shit load o support from USA and EU... Unlike Palestine which csnt even import cement.. Thanks to illegal occupation and blockade by Israel and useless "Arab league".

Here's an idea. Stop shooting rockets at Israel and then Israel will stop bombing Gaza.

Here is another idea .. Stop BOMBING kids on a beach collecting scrap.

 

[captainvancouver]

Because they got a shit load o support from USA and EU... Unlike Palestine which csnt even import cement.. Thanks to illegal occupation and blockade by Israel and useless "Arab league".



Here is another idea .. Stop BOMBING kids on a beach collecting scrap.

Wasn't that done during an active conflict? ...how about not firing first and then you'll have no casualties cuz there will be no conflict.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

Wasn't that done during an active conflict? ...

So during conflict children are fair game ?
I hear it's pretty much considered a war crime .. something you and your israeli frndsovebto defend n justify..

how about not firing first and then you'll have no casualties cuz there will be no conflict.

fair .. How about not building illegal settlements? Confiscating Palestinian lands,blocking supplies,occupying a state ? Arresting children ? Killing thousands of civilians? BOMBING UN facilities,schools n hospitals? Forcing Palestine from going to going to international courts and so on?

P.S: more Israelis have died of allergies than qassam rockets.

 

[Falcon29]

Here's an idea. Stop shooting rockets at Israel and then Israel will stop bombing Gaza.

Hey retard Indian, Israel's occupation all comes down to its agenda. Not due to any rockets. Which is why the British Balfour Declaration happened. The Zionist Agenda was to takeover Palestine through all means possible. This is why it targeted Palestinians since that day and why it occuippes their land to this day. And why it continues to allocate its budget towards settlements. And expected to announce 40,000 new ones this upcoming year.