Article: The World Bank's report for the Brussels donor meeting puts Gaza at the centre

Omar Shaban – Gaza

The World Bank report, which came after the White House meeting last Tuesday concerning Gaza — in which representatives of dozens of Arab and Western states and Israel took part, and which the Palestinian National Authority boycotted. This report is prepared for presentation at the meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee of the donor states to the Palestinian Authority, to be held in Brussels, Belgium, next Monday 19 March. This committee meets twice yearly to follow up the donors' funds to the Authority and define the nature of future interventions. But the meeting this time gains special importance because it comes soon after the White House meeting that focused on the situation in the Gaza Strip, amid the tension in the relation between Washington and the Palestinian Authority following the American president Trump's decision concerning Jerusalem, and amid the halt of contacts between them. In addition, the report carries many new aspects that must receive attention and analysis, some of them pointing, if timidly, to the future:
The report devotes 46 pages, more than half of it, to speaking of the Gaza Strip's conditions during the last two decades in all fields — and this is unfamiliar in the previous reports.
The report clearly criticises the Israeli measures imposed on the Gaza Strip: blockade, the barring of entry of dual-use goods, the scarcity of electricity, and the restrictions on freedom of movement for goods and persons.
The report affirms that the situation in the Gaza Strip cannot continue thus, and calls on all the related parties to work jointly to prevent the catastrophe's occurrence.
The report recommends applying dozens of immediate and medium-term interventions in many fields: electricity, sewage services, water, support for small enterprises, strengthening export, increasing the number of permits granted to merchants, supporting private-sector institutions, and much else.
The report offers a number of recommendations concerning the Gaza Strip, among them:

1) Integrating the public-sector employees and improving the efficiency of public work

2) Improving tax collection

3) Unifying the laws between the northern and southern governorates

4) Setting aside budgets to support small enterprises

5) Easing export from Gaza to the northern governorates and Israel

6) Issuing permits for merchants from Gaza to enter Israel

7) Widening the sea-fishing areas

8) Increasing electricity to the Gaza Strip

9) Building industrial zones and improving the existing ones

10) Supporting the private sector.

The report devotes 5 pages to the issue of integrating the employees of the Authority and of the former Gaza government into the public sector — from which it may be gleaned that the integration of the de facto government's employees, in the report's term, is not rejected, and the international community should help in the absorption process.
The report proposes that the process of absorbing the de facto government's employees is not automatic; rather, it must proceed on the basis of need in each sector, take account of population growth, and work to correct the imbalance occurring between the Gaza Strip and the northern governorates in what relates to the ratio of employees to population in certain sectors, such as the health and education sectors for example.
The process of absorbing the de facto government's employees must proceed through “vetting” according to the international specifications — the mechanism that was applied to the Gaza government's employees in 2014 for the disbursement of the financial grant.
The report calls on the Palestinian Authority to carry out the integration process, include that in the general budget, and present it to the donor bodies to examine the possibility of supporting it financially.
The report calls for carrying out training and qualification programmes for the public-sector employees in the Gaza Strip like those carried out in the northern governorates.
The report calls on the Palestinian Authority to work on reforming the government apparatus, increasing efficiency, and encouraging early retirement for its employees.
The report calls on Israel to be regular in transferring the clearance funds to the Palestinian Authority without delay.
The report points to a noticeable retreat in economic activity in the northern governorates because of the restrictions on the movement of persons, goods, and investment. The growth rate of gross domestic product for 2017 fell to only 2.4%, compared with a growth rate of 5% in the previous years.
Economic conditions in the Gaza Strip deteriorated sharply because of the shortage of liquidity, the retreat of international support for reconstruction, the deductions on the salaries of the National Authority's employees, and the inability of the former Gaza government to pay its employees' salaries fully and regularly. The growth rate of domestic product reached half a per cent for 2017, compared with a growth rate of 8% in 2016. The support set aside for reconstruction retreated to 55 million dollars in 2017, compared with 400 million dollars in 2016.