Conflict-ravaged Gaza is still being starved of food and medicines, but its children offer fresh hope for the future, an Irish UN official told an Oireachtas Committee today.
Portlaoise native John Ging told the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs the Palestinian territory still faces massive humanitarian challenges but remained optimistic amid adversity.
Mr Ging is head of the United Nations Relief & Works Agency which distributes aid to local people and runs schools for 200,000 children in Gaza.
He featured prominently in media reports during a 22-day conflict between Israel and Gaza in December and January which killed at least 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
The former Army officer, who has worked in Rwanda and Tanzania in the past, said: “We cannot even contemplate reconstructing Gaza and the devastation because there is inadequate access to humanitarian supplies such as food, medicine, blankets and clothes.
“There has been no easing on the restrictions on Gaza and therefore the people languish in the rubble of their despair,” he told the committee.
Mr Ging said he regretted that the rockets continued to be fired from Gaza into Israeli villages. “This is all the product of collective political failure.”
The official said half of Gaza’s 1.5 million population were children and they offered new hope for the future.
“We want them to grow up to be decent, civilised people with a mindset to be tolerant and to have the capacity to have a livelihood rather than rely on handouts.
“But they are growing up and increasingly being influenced by the environment around them," Mr Ging said.
Mr Ging also praised the courage of politicians who had “broken through the taboo that it is too dangerous to come to Gaza."
“There is a civilian population in peril and in desperate need of protection by effective political action,” he told the committee. The situation is very bleak and the prospect is even more bleak if we stay on the same course.”
The Foreign Affairs Committee is due to travel to Gaza on an Oireachtas fact-finding mission in coming weeks.
Irish Aid gave €8.6 million to Palestinians in 2008 and contributed €2.5 million to the international reconstruction plan.
PA