Word: relief
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...year economic siege imposed by Israel with help from Egypt and the U.S. even before Israel's air-and-ground assault had begun, international donors earlier this year pledged more than $4.5 billion to repair war damages. But that aid has failed to reach Gaza, according to Palestinians and relief agencies who accuse Israel of imposing Kafkaesque rules that bar from entry vital reconstruction materials and items as innocuous as glass, most schoolbooks, honey and family-size tubs of margarine...
...Says Chris Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA): "Because the Israelis are not allowing in any reconstruction material, that $4.5 billion is just a paper figure." With more than 80% of Gazans now surviving on humanitarian handouts from UNRWA, Gunness adds, "Palestinians are becoming more desperate and more extreme." (See pictures of Israeli soldiers sweeping into Gaza...
...Relief officials estimate that Gaza needs 40,000 tons of cement and 25,000 tons of iron to start repairing the homes, hospitals, schools and shops destroyed during Israel's offensive. But so far, according to GISHA, an Israeli legal-rights group, the Israelis have allowed only 19 trucks carrying construction material into Gaza since the war ended last January. "You could say that Israel has bombed Gaza back into the mud age," says UNRWA's Gunness, "because that's what they're building their houses...
...senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government recently confided to a U.N. colleague that Israel's goal for Gaza was "no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis." The U.N. official interpreted that to mean that Israel would provide Gaza with an intravenous drip of relief to keep its 1.5 million inhabitants alive but just barely, in hopes that the people would overthrow the Hamas government they voted into power in the latest Palestinian elections. But that hasn't happened yet, nor is it likely to: Hamas smuggles arms, money and supplies into Gaza through tunnels from...
This month, thousands of bereaved worldwide will observe the tsunami's fifth anniversary as solemnly as its first or its 50th. The rest of us can take some solace in the fact that while the tragedy of the tsunami touched every continent, so too did the relief effort that followed. More than 100 countries took part in the tsunami response. Some $13.5 billion was pledged in aid, with an unprecedented $5.5 billion donated by the general public. Not since the Live Aid famine-relief concerts of 1985 had the world's compassion been so galvanized. At one point, Britons were...