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Gaza One Year Later: Picking up the Pieces
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Edited
Transcript
of Remarks by Mr. Bill
Corcoran
Transcript No. 324 (24 February 2010)
To view the
video of this briefing online, go
toTranscript No. 324 (24 February 2010)
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/9289/pid/3584
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
18 February 2010
Mr. Bill Corcoran:
Thanks very much Yousef. I have a topic here which is not going to make an enjoyable afternoon for you. I think a number of people when they see me coming they say, ‘you are like the grim reaper because when you talk about Gaza all you do is you depress us’. And I’m guaranteed to depress you again today because the scene one year later, it is bleak. I want to present that to you, though, in a fashion which is not just an articulation of the statistics; you can read those in the newspaper. What I would like to do is give you a human insight into the conditions and the lives of the people by showing you a PowerPoint [presentation] that is going to bring this to your heart and to your head. We’ve also employed our staff in Gaza, we have 17 staff in Gaza, and we have one woman who is extraordinary in her abilities with video cameras and so we’ve used her to create a series we call our “Gaza Reality Series”. It’s all snippets of life in Gaza. Let me just start this whole session by giving you one image now. This is a short video of some of the destruction that was in Gaza approximately one year ago in the industrial zone.
[Video clip]
That remains the picture today. That factory and the others in that industrial zone lie almost as they were in this picture except they have been cannibalized now for spare parts. But there has been nothing rebuilt in that area and not one new job created in the area with the exception of people going around with donkey carts and salvaging whatever they can find in the rubble.
Now I think we all have to look at this situation in Gaza in the lens of what you and I see on TV every single day and that is Haiti. And it is so difficult to compare the situation of Gaza and Haiti because you look at the TV photos in Haiti and it is heartrending in the extreme. So, to compare the suffering of the people, I am not even going to attempt to do that but I will draw two distinctions which I think are crucial when we think of Gaza in the lens of Haiti and that is this; first of all, Haiti was a natural disaster. This was man-made. This did not need to happen and it did not need to happen in this manner. Secondarily, in almost any natural disaster around the world, one year later when you return, you can see that the work of governments and NGOs have substantially rebuilt the economy and the lives of the people. I would predict that one year from now when we go back to see scenes of Haiti we are going to see that homes have been rebuilt, clinics have been repaired and schools are in session and fully entertaining the children. But one year later in Gaza, of the 15,000 homes that were damaged or destroyed, not one single family home has been rebuilt. This is the situation we find ourselves in now.
Let me go to the first slide and remind you a bit of the topography that we are dealing with. The size of Gaza is really quite minuscule. It’s twice the size of Washington D.C., to give you some comparison. But within that parameter you have 1.5 million people. Remember that approximately half of the population, so over let’s say 800,000, are under the age of 16. That’s crucial in our discussions about where do we go in the future. On top of that, the density, the population density, exceeds that of Hong Kong. Now we all have images in our head of how tight things are in Hong Kong. That is minor in comparison to what the people live in the Gaza Strip.
Let’s remind ourselves now also about the isolation that has occurred over a period of time. If we think about the war in and of itself, in December of last year, and think of that only, that only takes some of the picture. The context really is a much more persistent pattern of isolation that has occurred over a period of years. It culminated, after going through all of these within November and December of 2008 with the borders being entirely shut off. Now what that meant for an ANERA [American Near East Refugee Aid] for instance was that each month we ship in a container of medicine, at least one container of medicine, worth about a million dollars to Gaza and hospitals and clinics. That was not allowed to occur in the month of November or December preceding the war. As a result then, the hospitals in the war were already depleted. So their ability to respond to the human casualties there was that much less than it had been prior to November.
This is just a quick summary which I won’t belabor of the humanitarian toll in that period. Twenty two days of bombing, we ended up with 1,400 killed and then you can see the damage to the infrastructure. The ice cream factory is just but one example of the damage to industrial infrastructure, which to this day has not been able to respond or somehow rebuild. If 15,000 homes have not been rebuilt, you can also imagine what’s happened to the industrial sector. Not one single factory has been rebuilt. Some are being repaired. In the end then, what you have is a society that has been fractured and it right now has no ability to heal itself. Of the 18,000 schools that have been destroyed only a handful have been repaired. Just recently the Israeli government allowed some cement to go into Gaza for the United Nations only. Those 23 trucks arrived and have been repairing some schools but that was just within the recent past and that’s not been permitted for anything else other than the United Nations. Of the agricultural land that is lying fallow, 33 percent is still in that condition. The reason it’s untouchable is because the water wells were destroyed and there is no ability to receive spare parts into Gaza. We could fix them. We could reclaim those agricultural lands and make the people more self-sufficient. But spare parts for wells, for irrigation systems those are not permitted in through the customs people at the border.
One of the tragedies that is inconceivable to me for the Israelis, from their perspective, is that everyday 65 million liters of raw sewage is dumped by the Palestinians into the Mediterranean Ocean. I’ll repeat that, 65 to 70 million liters every day. The reason being is that their sewage treatment plants, in many cases, were too old to handle the capacity but then many of them were also damaged during the war. Now in this year succeeding, the spare parts that they need just to do simple maintenance have not been available and as a result what they are doing on a regular basis is just pumping this untreated [sewage] out into the ocean. The stretch of coast line along Gaza is absolutely beautiful. Normally when you would drive along the coast line you would see the Mediterranean blue aqua marine. It is now a very disgusting brown that flows along the coast. When I would go there my staff literally would say, ‘do not eat the fish. We would recommend you not do that’. So if the locals are saying don’t eat the fish then what we are doing is another source of protein in their diet has been removed and they are that much more food dependent on the outside gifts of aid. Those million liters of sewage that are being dumped into the Mediterranean interestingly don’t stay there. They are flowing up the coast to Ashkelon, Ashdod and Tel Aviv. And so repeatedly international NGOs like ANERA have been asking the Israelis, ‘please for your own self interest, allow us to bring in piping so that we can repair the system. Allow us to import sewage treatment plant spare parts’, and that has not been acceptable. So we are in a condition right now which is harsh for the Palestinians, but for the whole region, it’s an ecological disaster.
Of the 700 private businesses that were destroyed through the war, a number of them have been very simple cottage industries; cottage industries that were doing sewing at home and then shipping these sewing materials into Israel. That has totally seized also. So what we have is a population that is approximately 40 to 50 percent unemployed. The rest of them I would say, from American standards, are under-employed but what they are doing then is they have some sense of keeping busy. But whether they are making money is another question.
We often will hear people using economic comparisons of why do we work in Gaza. Why would we work in Palestine at all? These are people who are living on fairly decent standards compared to something like Haiti or something like Africa. But here is the truth to the situation, 70 percent of the families in Gaza live on one dollar a day. We are talking under a thousand dollars a year then that these people are bringing in. How can they possibly survive on that? Now in comparison, the per capita income of Israel is 27 thousand dollars a year; so we are talking 27 versus one. In the West bank, just for your information, the West Bank is perhaps four thousand dollars a year. So the average for Palestinians is quite bleak. The number 80 percent of those people in Gaza who are living on food assistance is a conservative estimate. The United Nations are saying now that since the war, and particularly in the winter when people can’t grow their own food, that that number 80 percent is actually higher and probably 85 to 90 percent of the households now are dependent on someone coming in, like ANERA, and giving them a box of food and then they try to scrounge on that. The protein in their diet is limited. And what we’ve been doing is we’ve been seeing a gradual increase in the number of children who are malnourished. If you take one of these boxes of food that we ship in for instance, it’s a cardboard box that we package in the West Bank. We use West Bank vendors to supply the food. We have used a medical expert from our staff to pick the nutrition content of the food that we are putting in. But we have to be realistic. What we can put in there is not fresh. It’s not vegetables, it’s not fruit, it’s not things that are going to build up, especially the tiny bodies that are so prevalent within Gaza. As a result, what we are doing is we are filling people up with approximately two thousand calories per day. But what’s the nutritional content? As a result then, according to UNICEF [United Nations Children’s Fund] and the World Health Organization, at least 10 percent of the children are malnourished. I’ll show you something a little bit later on which shows another aspect of that stunting and pernicious problems we have with feeding children.
ANERA’s response has been in three distinct areas in a very much in a relief mode at this point and time. We have a rather large medical in-kind program, you’d be proud with the number of American organizations like AmeriCares, Catholic Medical Mission Board, Palestinian Children’s Relief [Fund] who on a regular basis are shipping supplies in through ANERA into Gaza. We have a regular system where we’ve been shipping in container after container, bringing it in and then distributing it from our warehouse, which is staffed by a pharmacist, to hospitals and clinics that we have vetted as professional and also organizations that are not questionable in their orientation. And we have been distributing that then to these hospitals and clinics throughout Gaza.
These are our quick list of some of our partners in this and you will see it’s all across the board. AmeriCares would by and large be our major support. And they are receiving their supplies from Abbott Labs, Pfizer, Merck, any of the major companies across the United States. This is just a quick picture of some of the packages of food that we would be bringing in. Those are the sizes. This food would last a family for approximately six days and then they need more food. This is a scene of some of the lines. It’s really quite pathetic to see people standing in lines for food. They are proud people. Anybody would be; anybody who has a family that would do anything to put food on the table for their children. And we have these people standing in line and we try to keep it as quick and as dignified as possible in this situation, which in the end, must be humiliating. I remember one gentleman came up to me and said, ‘please, we appreciate all of this but do one thing for me’. He said, ‘help us become independent again, we are tired of being reliant on the help of others’. Some of our partners in this we’ve been very thankful for Secours Islamique which is Islamic Relief France, United Holy Land Fund, an organization here in the States, and UNICEF.
One of the big problems that we see throughout Gaza, and it has not been solved yet, and that is access to water, clean water. Many of the delivery systems were bombed out during the Gaza war and many people didn’t have them even prior to the war. So what we have been doing is, in rather creative way, is shipping in packages of, not food, but just hygienic supplies. Everything from sanitary napkins, to soap, to shampoo but the things that they would need that would be basic to allow them to have a clean house and a clean family. This has been another aspect of what we have been doing in Gaza and each one of these has been absolutely determined by our staff, which is a combination of engineers, social workers, pharmacists and doctors. They’ve sat down and they’ve prioritized and this is how we have responded.
The situation of the children in Gaza is something that would bring you to tears when you see it. Children normally, when you walk into a pre-school, they would come running up to you and they will start to play and they would try to speak to you in English and practice their few words of English that they know. They don’t now. When they see a stranger, they run. They hide behind one of the teachers, they begin to cry. What the teachers are saying is they are getting complaints from the parents of the excessive bed wetting and bed wetting into ages of eleven and twelve. They find that the children are very nervous. They cry in the evening. If they hear thunder because of a lighting storm they cry with that. What’s happening is that this is coming out in other ways, particularly in the playground, in anger and violence. What we have done then is we were able to find a team of psychologists from Gaza who are trained in Post-traumatic stress syndrome and they went out and through social workers that were also trained in psychological and social work went out into some of the worse affected areas and we had them set up tents. We were able to find tents from UNICEF. We set up tents in some of the most destroyed areas. And what they would do is create safe havens for the children of the area, bring them in, play games with them as you can see. But the games were all designed and tailored in a way that would help the children to begin to develop coping skills and also to begin to express themselves. In the process of this, the psychologists were then assessing them and identifying the children that were the most damaged. What we found in the one year that we’ve run this program now is that 10 percent of the children require more intense, one-on-one counseling because they are, in the estimation of the psychologists, severely damaged.
Another aspect of it is that we need to keep the children fed and obviously what they are getting at home is insufficient. We’ve had a program for several years now that is sort of our hallmark program we call Milk for Pre-schoolers. Very basically, it’s taking a container of fortified milk, vitamin enriched, and a biscuit, that is also vitamin enriched, and we are supplying that to 20 to 25 thousand children every day in Gaza. We do this, we fan out through many of the pre-schools and they actually then give these to the children during the pre-school and have them drink it there. They are wonderful flavors. We took a vote among the children. They like the chocolate and the strawberry the best. With just this we have been able to cut the incidents of anemia in half among the children in these schools. We’ve dropped it from 38 percent down to 19 percent and we’ve done that through clinical tests with doctors from one of the local universities. This just says that right there. It’s an exciting program, very basic. What’s tragic is this program has been in existence now for seven years, but how long do we need to do basic elementary programs like this just to feed children?
This is the environment that the children are going to school in everyday. This was a pre-school. It was, as many were, severely destroyed and in some cases, for instance this school had to come down. What we have been doing then is we have decided to give the children one place that was safe and it was welcoming and normal for them. So we decided to do a program of rehabilitating as many pre-schools as we could across Gaza. The problem is how do you do that when you can’t get building supplies into the country and you can’t get cement? Well, this is what we did; we went out, and with limited supplies, were able to do some patching. But then we began going to the homes of people who had lost their homes during the bombing and we would literally buy from them their sinks, their doors, shelving, anything that was left in the rubble. It would give them some money and it would also allow us, in a very patchwork way, be able to brighten up a school and make it a more safe environment. In the process, what we also did, we put in fresh water in each one of these centers and we also made certain that everything that we installed was at a child level and child safe. There is nothing worse than trying to go get a drink of water and it is at an adult height and you are only two or three feet high.
Water continues to be a problem, it was a problem before the war and it is now. ANERA as an aside has been designated by the U.S. government as their contractor for all water and sanitation in Palestine. Now that’s wonderful but right at this point and time we are not being permitted to do any water and sanitation projects with U.S. government money in Gaza. So what we are doing is we are using our own money. We cannot get any piping in there because of Israeli law so we are using PVC piping which is made in Gaza. That piping doesn’t do nearly what a steel or cement pipe would do but it’s sufficient to give more and more people access. We have been delivering these projects across and particularly in some of the camps in the most affected areas.
Another thing that has been fascinating is as we try to think creatively we look at projects we never thought we would do before. One of them has been this; the agricultural fields. Some of them are so chocked with plastic sheeting that they use to create a sort of a hot-house effect that something had to be done to clear up these fields and at the same time employ people doing it. And so what we did was we literally employed hundreds of people across the Gaza Strip to go out and pick this out of the fields, to clean the fields out again. We gave them ten dollars a day, which was sufficient for them to go put food on the table, and then with this plastic we were then able to find a plant in Gaza that would welcome it as a raw material. They then recycled it, melted it down and then crafted it into irrigation piping. So we ended up having three benefits from one project and this was one of the most cheap, efficient projects I think I’ve seen in years. It benefited everybody. We are going to start up another segment of that now. They are going to do it now before the growing season starts in another few weeks. This was a fun one. We are being nicknamed now the Kentucky fried chicken of Gaza because we’ve been giving out chickens to people, but chickens not to eat. We’ve given them ten chickens, one rooster, a cage that we have constructed through local manufacturers and we’ve been giving them feed and antibiotics. In the process, what we are trying to do is make more and more families self-sufficient, insert some protein into the diet of their children, maybe they can sell a few eggs and they continue to breed these chickens. It’s been a wonderful boost for a number of families. We have done that with, I think, 450 families so far and are going to continue to double that now because of a new infusion of money.
I am going to open this up for questions in a second but let me end up with one other video that was made in Gaza by our staff and this is a situation where, as I said, 15 thousand homes were damaged, nothing has been rebuilt and even though is winter in Gaza, this is where many people are right now.
[Video clip]
One year later and that’s the way they are living. We are hoping it’s going to change soon but we are not getting much in the way of new or progressive cooperation from any of the parties involved. And I repeat, any of the parties. So we go on like this. I think, right now, this morning I spoke to our Gaza staff and I said, ‘tell me some new things. What is going lately that’s a new development?’ and one of them said to me, 'we have a new development and that is the Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors without Borders, is saying now that they estimate that 500,000 people in Gaza are now using Tramadol'. Tramadol is an opiate. It’s coming in through the tunnels and the people are self medicating because they are so depressed. That’s where they are right now and that’s why the world needs to pay attention to this. It’s in the long term interest of everyone--Israel, world peace--that we not let this humanitarian disaster continue unchecked.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Bill Corcoran is the president of ANERA.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.