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Join on Telegram Rabat – A new report from the United Nations titled “Gaza-Ten Years later,” has declared Gaza “unlivable” following ten years of occupation by Israel.
Released Tuesday, the report paints a grim picture of chronic of water, power and fuel. With a median age of just 18, Gaza’s staggeringly high youth unemployment rate of 60 percent is indicative of lost generations.
According to UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid and Development Activities, Robert Piper, “Gaza has continued on its trajectory of de-development, in many cases even faster than we had originally projected.”
“When you’re down to two hours of power a day,” Piper said,“and you have 60 percent youth unemployment rates … that unlivability threshold has been passed quite a long time ago.”
Add to this steadily declining incomes, healthcare, education standards and electricity availability, Gaza has rapidly become a catastrophe in the making.
“I see this extraordinarily inhuman and unjust process of strangling gradually two million civilians in Gaza that really pose a threat to nobody,” Piper added.
Gaza’s only water supply is predicted to be “irreversibly depleted” by just 2020, making the need for rapid and comprehensive international intervention a necessity for survival.
Piper is quick to point out that, as dire as the situation currently is, there is still time to pull Gaza back from the edge of enforced oblivion. It would, however, require an international will that has, to date, been lacking.
“We need first to put these people a bit higher up, if not at the top of the agenda,” he said.
“We’re 100 percent optimistic that it’s doable if there’s a willingness on the part of the key actors to make it happen.”
Advocating for a complete lifting of the Israeli-Egyptian enforced blockade, Robert Vallent, spokesman for the UN Development Program in Gaza, explained that what is needed is “… to provide people with the critical capital investment for them to be able to sustain themselves in a dignified manner,” he said, “which means there needs to be a long-term plan and strategy to ensure the economic and institutional rehabilitation of the economy of Gaza.”
“This is a man-made Political situation,” he added, “that requires political action.”
Gaza is home to approximately two million people. Critics and observers alike agree that current humanitarian efforts are serving only to slow down the relentless decline.
Gaza’s only power plant was shut down in April, forcing Palestinians to rely on feeder lines from the architects of the situation, Israel and Egypt.
