MIDEAST: End of Red Cross Aid Upsets Palestinians

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ferry Biedermann

BEITUNYA, West Bank, Nov 25 2003 (IPS) - Naima Zayyad tries to put a brave face on it. Her husband has not worked since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, more than three years ago, and now he is ill.

She would have liked to give her seven children something special for the Muslim holiday Eid El-Fitr that marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan and started on Tuesday. But she could only afford a new pair of trousers for her youngest son.

“For more than a year, since before Ramadan last year, I received special food aid,” says the 34-year old Zayyad. “But now they stopped. I received the last of it more than a month ago. I cannot afford to spend money on anything else but the most basic necessities.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has indeed terminated its two emergency humanitarian food aid programmes to the Palestinian population on the West Bank. The end of the programmes was gradual, with the last of the direct food aid distributed last week.

The programmes were set up in June last year after the Israeli operation ‘Defensive Shield’ and its aftermath. These were designed to cope with the crisis that resulted from the military action and the re-occupation of the Palestinian areas.

The aid programmes reached some 50,000 families, or about 300,000 people, according to the ICRC at a cost of 45 million dollars.

Since the programmes were started, they were extended twice. But now the Red Cross has decided to end them. The reasons are twofold; budgetary and political, the latter being the most remarkable.

“There is no reason for the humanitarian crisis here,” says Vincent Bernard, spokesman for the ICRC in Jerusalem. “There is enough food, the infrastructure is intact, it’s just that the people don’t have any money.”

The ICRC is arguing that Israel as the occupying power has the obligation to allow the civilian population to earn a living.

“The state of Israel has the right to take security steps, the Geneva Convention is very clear about that,” says Bernard. “But it has to do so while minimising the impact for the population.” At the moment, he says, there is “a lack of proportionality”.

A senior Israeli official who is one of the people responsible for the Palestinian civilian population hotly disputes that. He says that the authorities are making all efforts possible to make a distinction between “terrorists” and the “civilian population”.

He points out that Israel is allowing once again 15,000 Palestinian workers to cross into the country to work, while in his words, each and everyone of them is a possible security risk. Some attackers have in the past come into Israel with official permits.

Before the outbreak of the intifada, some 150,000 Palestinians were working in Israel daily. They also provided much needed cash injection for the local economy.

The economy in the Palestinian areas has also been affected by the severe internal “closures”. That means that people and products can often not even cross from one city to another or from a rural area to an urban market.

The ICRC aid programmes fell into two categories. In towns and cities, such as Beitunya which is part of Ramallah, families like the Zayyads received some 90 dollars in vouchers every month, to spend on basic food stuff in a designated local supermarket.

In rural areas the food aid was delivered directly in the form of flour and rice or a package including oil, sugar and salt.

Ahmed al-Hindi is a lanky 40-year old shop owner in the village of Sinjiil, between Ramallah and Nablus. He used to be on the local committee that determined who was a deserving candidate for the ICRC aid.

On the occasion of the Eid Al-Fitr he gave his three sons a haircut in what used to be a billiard room next to his shop. The youngest is struggling tearfully against the hair-clippers.

Al-Hindi does not approve of the ICRC motivation for ceasing the assistance.

“They are not hurting the Israelis by stopping the aid, it is going to hurt the poor people who needed it,” says Al-Hindi.

He would rather have the international community find some other ways to pressure the Israelis into easing the conditions for the population while maintaining current levels of food aid.

Al-Hindi is also scornful about the way the Red Cross aid worked in local areas. There was “simply too much corruption”, he says.

“Only half the people deserved to receive the aid, the rest were family members of people on the committee or other important local people,” he says.

On top of that, the quality of the flour and rice provided by foreign donors or the ICRC was so bad that the people would not eat it. Instead it was used as chicken feed, says Al-Hindi.

Other people in Sinjiil tell about other irregularities. One man says it was normal for people to have to work for food aid. He and his eldest son were made by the municipality to sweep the streets for four days in order to receive a ration of 50 kilogrammes of flour, he says.

In the cities, the programme seems to have worked better. The voucher system is praised highly by the owner of the main supermarket in Ramallah, Al Sanabel, where people could do their shopping.

“It was good for business and it was good for the recipients,” says the owner, Azzam Muqbal. Very few of the people who used to get the food aid had shown up in his supermarket to do shopping for the holidays, he says.

Muqbal is not convinced by the ICRC argument either. He thinks the Palestinian Authority should somehow provide for the people.

“They pay thousands of people a salary because they are supposed to be in one security service or another. Why don’t they take over the voucher system too and run a social programme?”

Naima Zayyad, who needed the aid so much, wants to steer clear of politics but she too does not understand why the assistance has now stopped.

“Every day is a little bit worse than the day before,” she says. “The situation is not better than when I started getting the vouchers.”

She looks doubtful for a moment and then says, “if this would make the Israelis remove the roadblocks and enable us to work again, then it would be good but I don’t think at all that this step is going to have that result”.