YOU may think that after a dozen years of blockade by Israel, three devastating wars and the rule of a harsh Islamist government, life in Gaza could hardly get worse. But the prospect of another war and a dire shortage of cash to pay for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, better known as UNRWA, mean that it can. Last year President Donald Trump’s administration said it would withhold $305m of the $365m that has annually serviced the agency, which has supported most of Gaza’s 2m people for the past seven decades. Now the cash is running out.
Moreover, since the end of March a series of protests near the border fence with Israel has seen at least 120 Gazans shot dead by the Israeli army. Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, has been sending a defiant wave of home-made rockets and mortars into Israel, plus makeshift kites laden with devices to set fire to Israeli farmland. Israel has responded with air raids. Gazans are terrified that Israel may be preparing for another full-blooded war to...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa https://ift.tt/2K89WDx
EmoticonEmoticon