Towards coordinating aid to the Gaza Strip so it reaches those entitled to it

Omar Shaban

The Israeli bombardment continuing since Tuesday the eighth of July escalates, and with it continues the bombardment and destruction of thousands of houses, public institutions, and infrastructure, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans from their areas of residence. Some observations:

• At the time the Gaza Strip is subjected to unprecedented aggression and destruction, there are many companies, institutions, and individuals inside and outside who see in that a great opportunity for enrichment through obtaining a share of the donations cake. The weakness of the consensus government, its lack of sufficient experience, its complete silence, and its non-clarification of the mechanism of the donations and the outlets of their distribution give a golden opportunity to these institutions and personalities to practise their plundering.

• The multiplicity of the relief funds and the donation campaigns for the Gaza Strip, whether inside Palestine or at the regional level. With appreciation for these efforts, work must proceed on finding a clear mechanism for monitoring and following up these donations, and clarifying to the harmed how to benefit from them. It must be announced to society who manages this money and the criteria of disposing of it.. The donation-collection campaigns must announce in advance how these assistances will be distributed and who are the intermediary persons and institutions through which the disbursement will take place.

• For information, many of the international institutions were suffering weakness in their budgets, so they wait for the war's end in order to benefit, to fill their coffers and bring new employees from their countries suffering unemployment and financial crises, through benefiting from the cake of the expected funding for the Gaza Strip, especially from the Arab funding.

• The employees of the Gaza government have not received any advances until now; thousands of them have not received any salary for seven months. It is injustice itself. These funds can include these employees within their programmes. The national consensus government must work on paying their salaries so that unity is embodied in a real way on the ground.

• What is the fate of the money the national consensus government allocated for the Gaza Strip? How much is the amount that was allocated, and did it actually arrive or not? And how will it be allocated? As I have learned, the largest part of this money was allocated to international institutions working in the Gaza Strip? It is not clear why most of it was allocated to the international institutions! Likewise it is not clear how it will be distributed and who is responsible for disposing of it. The government is required to issue a detailed statement clarifying all these aspects.

• Some worn-out, expired personalities have taken the initiative with donation-collection campaigns for the Gaza Strip — personalities known for corruption for long years. These personalities, who were a cause of the disasters that happened to the Gaza Strip and worked with all their effort to besiege Gaza in the past, will resort to distributing part of this money through their network of personal relations without any accountability, as happened in the past. They do not collect the donations for Gaza's sake but in order to inflate their bank accounts — and in an attempt by them, which will certainly fail, to polish their history. They are the brokers of wars and disasters.

• Just to recall: hundreds of the families whose houses were destroyed in the 2008–2009 war and the 2012 war have still not received any compensations, despite the immense money allocated for this purpose, whether at the Sharm el-Sheikh conference on the second of March 2009 or the many programmes announced at that time.