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PNA complains about decline of donations by 70 percent

Xinhua, August 28, 2016 Adjust font size:

Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Al-Hamdallah said Sunday that the international financial support to his government was reduced by 70 percent in 2016.

Al-Hamdallah said in an interview with local TV stations that the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) government received 350 million U.S. dollars so far in the past eight months, saying that this reduction "is part of the political and financial blockade on the PNA."

He hinted that some countries are imposing a full blockade on the Palestinian leadership due to its political positions, without naming a particular country.

The United States paid this year 250 million dollars worth of projects that were implemented last year, but did not pay the PNA any thing and did not approve a single dollar for this year, he said.

The Prime Minister said that there are some Arab states that have not offered anything, like Qatar since 2014 and the United Arab Emirates since 2013, which did not pay its 200 million dollars promised allocations from the Cairo conference in October 2014 in the aftermath of the Israeli military offensive on Gaza.

The Palestinian government declared last January that the PNA budget for this year is 4.25 billion dollars, with financing gap of 386 million dollars, which includes the Gaza Strip controlled by the Islamic Hamas movement since 2007.

Al-Hamdallah said that his government expenditure on Gaza was over 116 million dollars, while Hamas movement running the strip collects nearly 26 - 40 million dollars of taxes.

Regarding the Gaza reconstruction, the Palestinian Prime Minister said that the government received only 36 percent of the 4.9 million dollars promised after the donor states meeting at the Cairo conference in 2014.

He added that only 6,820 homes were reconstructed out of 11,000 destroyed homes, so far, but if the allocations were fulfilled, then the file of Gaza reconstruction would have been closed.

In the Gaza Strip, there are 1.9 million Palestinians live in the 360 sq. km territory completely ruled by Hamas. Besides the Israeli blockade, Israel waged three wars on Gaza, the largest was in 2014 and lasted for 50 days, which left the coastal enclave in severe conditions and destruction in infrastructure and thousands of houses. Endit