Gazan intellectuals launch campaign to solve humanitarian crisis

Palestinian activists, intellectuals, academics, writers and journalists launched on Saturday a popular and electronic campaign aiming at saving the Gaza Strip from an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

They said the coastal enclave, which is ruled by Islamic Hamas movement and has been under a tight Israeli blockade for ten years, is suffering severe humanitarian crises which must stop with better life ensured for the population.

Abdul Karim Ashour, the campaign's media coordinator, told reporters that the campaign will last three months, saying "it is against all security measures that turned the populations' life in Gaza into torment and distress."

"Intellectuals, artists, doctors, writers, businessmen and journalists will intensify their efforts through their means of contacts with the authorities to end the suffering and the humanitarian crises that the population is living in," he said.

Dozens of activists rallied Saturday before one of the towers destroyed during the 50-day Israeli large-scale military offensive on Gaza in 2014.

"The aim is to look for a better living condition for our children, our women and our elderly people who have been paying a heavy price for around ten years of siege, poverty, fear and unemployment," said Abdul Karim.

The demonstrators, who carried banners of a hash-tags #Save_Gaza, called on the international community to hold the two million population in the Gaza Strip to end their decade-long plight.

Because of Israeli blockade and security measures imposed on the coastal enclave since Hamas' violent control of the territory in 2007, unemployment rate there has reached 43.7 percent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The internal Palestinian division between Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party has also further worsened the daily life in Gaza. Endit