$1.5m emergency aid for Palestinians

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) yesterday announced $1.5 million aid for emergency medical supplies and infrastructure repairs in the Palestinian territories, said an Abu Dhabi-based senior official of the programme.

The aid will be administered through the Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People (PAPP), which is a UNDP relief project in the occupied territories, said Nadir Hadj-Hammou, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP's Resident Representative in the UAE.

He said the money has been released by Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of UNDP in New York, for the purchase and distribution of urgently needed medical supplies.

The funds will also be used to begin immediate infrastructure repairs in the different Palestinian municipalities.

He said the UNDP is deeply concerned about the increasing level of violence and the devastating loss of life over the course of the past few weeks. The UNDP administrator, he said, has also visited the area twice.

With these funds, the UNDP's representative said that the organisation will immediately start repairing damaged roads, destroyed buildings, downed electricity and telephone lines, and uprooted water supply systems.

Urgently needed medical supplies will be purchased and distributed to hospitals and other health care providers.

Quoting Brown, Hadj-Hammou said: "We hope that this assistance will help to reduce the suffering of civilians who are under a 24-hour curfew in some cases without access to food, water, electricity or medical aid."

He noted that some municipalities have been designated 'closed military areas', making it extremely difficult to gain access to their inhabitants and institutions.

"It has been possible for United Nations organisations such as UNRWA, PAPP and Unicef to gain access to provide food and medical supplies," he said.

The UNDP's Palestinian Programme is one of the leading humanitarian and development organisations in the occupied Palestinian Territory. Since its inception in 1978, the PAPP has made a considerable and sustained contribution in assisting Palestinian people through periods of occupation and the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority.

Hadj-Hammou said that UNDP has provided some $400 million in development assistance through the PAPP. The tangible result of the two decades of UNDP's work are visible in the hundreds of classrooms, roads, water and sewage networks and health care facilities.

Since September, 2000, he explained, the PAPP has been implementing an Emergency Response Programme to deal with the increasing humanitarian needs, especially emergency employment generation of Palestinians.