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Israel/Palestine

Into the prison

DCA had tried to negotiate with the Israelis for months to get DCA’s Representative in occupied Palestine to gain Israeli permission to enter Gaza, without avail. But it in the second week of May it appeared that finally we’d gained Israeli permission.

An empty crossing terminal

We made our way to Eretz, the main the crossing terminal. A giant hangar resembling an airport, the building is several hundred meters long with ceilings 30 meters high, accommodating 24 windows for Israeli army representatives to control the movement of thousands of people in and out of the Gaza strip. Only 1 was working; the building was spookily empty.

The partner National Agency for Family Care are stocking food for families without homes.

We went to monitor the work of DCA’s team and its partners and to see first hand the effects of the war and the economic siege. Whilst DCA partner Near East Council of Churches has had to start distributing milk to malnourished children, its partner National Agency for Family Care is feeding families whose homes were destroyed during the war.
Tens of thousands of damaged homes – including that of DCA’s own Program Coordinator, Omar Al Majdalawi – cannot replace the glass in their windows, blown out by bombs.

Half-finished buildings

Nor can any of the hundreds of construction projects – including those to repair or rebuild homes and schools destroyed by the Israeli military – move forward. Half-finished buildings litter the Gazan landscape, and unlike in many African countries, these aren’t the abandoned projects of overly ambitious businessmen, but the paralyzed projects of the world’s donors, funded by tax payers.

Homes cannot be rebuild due to the lack of building materials.

A never ending list

I spoke with the a senior official at the UN Refugees Works Agency, the main aid provider in Gaza, in charge of hundreds of construction projects across the Gaza strip. ‘The highest representative of the UN in Gaza visited me recently and asked me for a list of items I needed to make progress. I told him that there are thousands of items. There are 100 items just to complete a window – a rubber seal, the metal frame, the silicone, the screens, etc. He asked me for a list of the items for projects near completion. I gave him this list, which was presented to Netanyahu himself. Still, there’s been no progress.’