Ease Gaza blockade to end misery, says UNRWA chief
When Swiss economist Philippe Lazzarini was starting his UN career in the mid 2000s, there was enough optimism in international aid circles about Gaza for some to think it could become another Hong Kong.
Conditions have since deteriorated under a 16-year blockade that is a major factor in pushing most of its two million people into dependence on UN food aid and other assistance.
The aid is delivered mostly by the agency headed by Mr Lazzarini, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). “Gaza has taken the exact opposite trajectory,” Mr Lazzarini said.
“Instead of a prosperous, dynamic area it has become a kind of an artificially created humanitarian welfare economy and community.”
The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was followed by legislative elections, in which President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction and other secular rivals of the militant group Hamas failed to coalesce.
Their ineptitude helped to hand Hamas, supported by Iran, victory in the poll.
A Palestinian civil war followed and, by 2007, Hamas had taken Gaza over, resulting in a strengthening of Israel’s blockade on the territory and border closures by Egypt.
Several wars have taken place between Hamas and Israel. Most of those killed were Palestinian civilians.
Over the past week, increasing levels of violence, which culminated in the killing of seven Israeli civilians near Jerusalem, threatened to start another war.
But it appears to have been averted by US intervention.
If another war was to start, UNRWA would go into emergency mode, Mr Lazzarini said, to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches trapped people.
The organisation negotiated with Israel in previous wars for the evacuation of non-combatants and the reunification of Palestinian children separated from their families.
“We keep hearing when will be the next cycle of violence, when is the next relapse?” Mr Lazzarini said.
But, as with the violence, long-term social and economic stagnation in Gaza is outside the UNRWA’s control.
It will keep grinding away at the future of the young Pal
estinians of Gaza no matter how much the UNRWA gives out food, how well it operates schools and clinics, or collects rubbish from the camps, Mr Lazzarini said.
“You cannot promote an economy in an environment where the movement of people, goods, trade and financial transactions are restricted,” he said. He called a 14-year-old UN resolution to be implemented to ease the blockade.
The Security Council passed the resolution, No 1860, during a war between Hamas and Israel in early 2009.
It called for a ceasefire and a “sustained and regular flow of goods and people” in and out of Gaza. It recognised the UNRWA as having a vital role in “providing humanitarian and economic assistance”.
Since 2015, more than $5.7 billion of international aid money has been spent in Gaza, said British charity Oxfam. It forecast that of the 800,000 young Palestinians who cannot leave Gaza, 63 per cent will grow up jobless.
“We have been dealing with Gaza in the same way for the past 15 years,” said Mr Lazzarini, who worked as head of marketing at Union Bancaire Privee, in Geneva. “The situation is not getting any better.”
He said the UNRWA has invested in providing vocational training and support for some young entrepreneurs in the digital and solar energy fields, on top of regular education.
But these were “individual successes”. Allowing Gaza’s inhabitants to travel, trade and have access to international markets and the financial system is a “minimum prerequisite to put in place a type of a socio-economic environment”, he said.
“This is without talking about a lasting political solution, but at least it would be a step towards a [better] situation,” he said.
The US was instrumental in establishing the UNRWA in 1949, and is the agency’s main donor. One UN official privately called the US contribution “guilt money” over support for Israel’s creation in 1948.
The agency has headquarters in Amman and Gaza. It also works in the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
Mr Lazzarini was appointed head in 2020 after a UN ethics division alleged that senior members of the UNRWA management committed acts of sexual misconduct, nepotism and bullying.
Before moving to Jordan, Mr Lazzarini was deputy UN Special Co-ordinator for Lebanon, as the country’s financial meltdown accelerated. He studied in Neuchatel and Lausanne, Switzerland, the country where Palestinian banker Youssef Beidas died, in exile, in 1968.
Mr Beidas was a refugee in Lebanon, where he set up a money exchange and later built a business empire. He believed economic expansion was key to a Palestinian rebirth.
Although Mr Beidas’s empire collapsed in 1966 after Lebanese politicians turned against him, he owed his rise to Lebanon’s openness and position as commercial centre.
In Gaza, a modern-day Mr Beidas would have little chance of such success.
We have been dealing with Gaza in the same way for the past 15 years. The situation is not getting any better