VINCENT O'REILLY,
Sir, - Unless there is a lifting of curfews and restrictions which bar Palestinians from working and stop the free movement of produce to market, the unacceptable fact that one in five Palestinian children are today malnourished will only deepen further into a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in the region.
During my last mission in June of this year I witnessed seven out of eight cities of the West Bank closed and under curfew. Curfew means that people cannot leave their homes for days at a time, roads are blocked by checkpoints manned by armed soldiers from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), with bulldozed mounds of earth or concrete blocks and or deep channels cutting the road.
The IDF call these areas military closed zones and the blockades are only lifted for a few hours every day. The local population is not permitted to travel in or out and tight restrictions on the movement of residents makes people feel that they are locked inside a large prison or holding camp. Indeed the fact that on any one day over 1 million people are denied free movement by armed soldiers means that citizens of the West Bank and Gaza are being held in the largest open-air prison in the world today.
With loss of employment and income poverty increasing daily, children are beginning to beg for food - something that had not been seen before.
All ways of life are affected by the closures, curfews and restrictions on movement. Services, emergency or otherwise, are compromised including the provision of health services, operation of clinics, conduct of routine immunization of children, travel of the chronically sick for chemotherapy or dialysis and normal school activities.
Markets cannot function and the local economy, both inside the cities as well as in the surrounding rural areas, are severely affected. The scale and depth of poverty and unemployment, already high, is reaching unprecedented levels. In the West Bank, 58 per cent of households are below the poverty line (€ 2.4 per day), while in Gaza the figure reaches 85 per cent.
The affects of this situation is already resulting in malnutrition, ill-health, psychosocial trauma, depression and psychosis. Agriculture is on the verge of collapse, livelihoods are threatened and for many people destitution is close.
Ireland must continue to urge both sides to end the cycle of violence, revenge and retaliation while, at the same time, calling for a lifting of restrictions and curfews which disproportionately victimise innocent civilians, in particular women and children.
At the same time Non Government Organisations need to accelerate and intensify their humanitarian response programmes so as to send a message of hope where only pain and despair presently reside. - Yours, etc.,
VINCENT O'REILLY, Chief Executive, Refugee Trust International, Blessington Street, Dublin 7