ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday 7 January 2013
RAMALLAH, West Bank: The Palestinian self-rule government is close to being “completely incapacitated,” largely because Arab countries haven’t delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in promised aid, the Palestinian prime minister said in an interview yesterday.
If allowed to continue, the Palestinian Authority’s unprecedented financial crisis will quickly double the number of Palestinian poor to 50 percent of a population of roughly 4 million, Salam Fayad told The Associated Press.
Fayad said the malaise is further boosting the political appeal of Hamas while discrediting him and other proponents of a nonviolent path to statehood in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Hamas seized Gaza from Fayad’s boss, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in a 2007 takeover, leaving Abbas with only the West Bank.
The failure of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority to deliver on many of its promises, coupled with recent Israeli concessions to Hamas, “has produced a reality of a doctrinal win for what Hamas stands for, and correspondingly a doctrinal defeat for the Palestinian Authority,” Fayad said.
The Palestinian Authority was established nearly two decades ago, as part of interim peace deals with Israel, and was meant to make way after five years for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. However, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations repeatedly broke down, at times amid bursts of violence, and failed to produce a final deal.
Categories: Arab World, Asia, Palestine
Who should be ‘blasted’? Well, of course those who create the dependency on aid by strangling the economic activities in Gaza. If the Gaza economy could develop in a normal way then all this foreign aid would not be needed.