Feature: Gaza's Palestinian refugees face unbearable woes amid shrinking UN-backed aids

Palestinian Nayef Abu Hamdi was 13 years old when he first came to the Gaza Strip as a refugee in 1948 when the state of Israel was created, and now he still remembers the days before he left his village of Herebia, south of Ashkelon, together with his family.

"Life was very good in the village," Abu Hamdi says, as he and his family are leading a very hard life in the Shati (Beach) refugee camp in western Gaza city.

Abu Hamdi's family lives in a house that is no more than 100 square meters and is barely enough for 15 men, women and children. The crumbling walls and the tin-made roof suggest how shabby their house is.

Refugees in the Gaza Strip represent two-thirds of the coastal enclave's 1.8 million population, where they live in eight camps. The Shati camp houses 90,000 refugees in an overcrowded small area without enough infrastructure.

According to a World Bank report, Gaza's jobless rates now stands as excruciatingly high as 43 percent.

The 80-year-old refugee told Xinhua that he and his family are living under unbearable conditions, forcing them to rely on aids for food and money.

"In our village before 1948, we used to eat what we plant and all the village residents were unified as if they were one family. None of them counted or relied on foreign donations or aid at that time," said the old man.

"Since I became a refugee until now, we have been depending on foreign humanitarian aid," he went on to say.

Asked if he wants to say something on the eve of the World Refugee Day, which was approved by the United Nations in 2000, Abu Hamdi said: "In fact I blame all of them for not helping me create a better living for me, my children and other refugees."

His wife Hanan, who is also a refugee from Be'er Sheva in southern Israel, said that the vast majority of refugees in the Gaza Strip "were all apparently forced to live in a misery kind of life to forget about their legitimate right of return."

"I go for prayers everyday and I pray to God that our living conditions could improve," said Hanan. "But they should know that we will never stop seeking our legitimate right of return until we go back to our homes."

The thing that is even more tragic for the refugees is that UN-sponsored humanitarian aids, their very lifeline, has been dwindling, and that has enraged Abu Hamdi and his family.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has cut food handouts, stopped interim jobs for young graduates and minimized the financial aid it pays to every family, they said, adding that "actually, the aid is barely enough to cover our basic needs in the holy fasting month of Ramadan."

The UNRWA was founded in 1949. Since then, the humanitarian aid organization has helped some five million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, east Jerusalem, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

Nowadays, UNRWA has been experiencing a financial crisis in its budget due to the lack of financial donations amid an increasing number of refugees every year. About 97 percent of the UN mission's budget come from donors.

A few days ago, UNRWA Commissioner Pierre Krahenbuhl said in the Jordanian capital Amman that the current crisis of UNRWA is the "most tensed and risky" since its establishment. He said in a statement that the shortage in the budget has affected the UNRWA's ability to serve the refugees.

"Currently we face 101 million U.S. dollar shortage in financing our schools for half a million pupils this fall in the Gaza Strip," he said.

"UNRWA can be able to pay salaries for its activities until September, therefore aid has to be sent as urgent as possible to fill the gap and keep providing educational services," he added. Endit