Tuesday, November 21, 2006

UNRWA urges international community to alleviate human catastrophe in Beit Hanun

"Gaza - The UNRWA has urged the international community to donate at least 2.5 million dollars to help in alleviating the human catastrophe which the IOF troops inflicted on Beit Hanun city in northern Gaza Strip.

The IOF troops killed and wounded hundreds of Palestinian citizens, the bulk of them were women and children, in the city within 9 days of relentless tanks and warplanes shelling and bloody incursions.

Karin Abu Zaid, the UNRWA commissioner, asserted that the optimism the world attached to Israel's pullout of Gaza Strip last year turned into a mere mirage amidst the non-stop IOF troops' aggressions on the Palestinian people in the tiny Strip.

"The terrible deterioration in the Palestinian people's economic and humanitarian conditions in Gaza weren’t a new phenomenon as such deterioration was there for a long time; yet the increased IOF troops' military operations and destruction in the Strip have aggravated the problem manifolds, especially with the economic siege imposed on the Palestinian people since Hamas won the democratic elections in the PA", Abu Zaid underlined.

She, furthermore, underscored that the tragic incidents in Beit Hanun served as clear evidence that the cycle of violence should come to an end immediately, adding that her organization extended a lot of humanitarian assistances to the affected families in the city.

Yet, she pointed out, the challenge the UNRWA was facing is how to rebuild the 1,000 homes destroyed by Israeli shelling in the city.

The UNRWA was established in 1949 to answer the needs of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees driven out of their homes at gunpoint at the hands of armed Jewish gangs who established their "illegal" Hebrew state on usurped Palestinian lands.

A number of UN arms, including the UNHRC among others, were shocked with the scenes of murder and destruction in the city as a result of the IOF troops' carnage as they made visits to the beleaguered city.

However, unshaken by the international criticism of their heinous crimes against innocent Palestinian civilians in the Strip, defiant IOF troops resumed shelling of Palestinian homes in Beit Hanun.

According to eyewitnesses, a number of IOF military vehicles and tanks advanced Monday into the northern tip of the city before bulldozing vast areas of agricultural lands in it.

At least four tank shells were fired by the Israeli tanks at Ezbat Abed Rabbo area in the city, inflicting material damage but no casualties were reported."

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