Israeli occupation bans Palestinian children from celebrating Eid

By Maha Abd el-Hady, IOL Palestine correspondent

OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, December 4 (IslamOnline) – Palestinians welcome this year’s Eid-ul-Fitr in worse conditions than they were last year. The state of mourning is the only common feature among Palestinian families.

They are either mourning a son killed by the Israeli occupation troops or showing solidarity with an other family mourning a slain member.

This state of public mourning is leaving no room for Eid festivities.

Also, poverty and the inability to buy new Eid clothes for gifts for children is a common complaint among the majority of Palestinians.

Palestinian merchants have been waiting for the end of Ramadan to sell some of their stockpiled commodities, but to no avail.

With the Palestinian economy suffering a crippling recession, some shop owners offered a 10-shekel (two dollars) fixed price for everything.

Abu Maen, owner of a shop in El-Naseria street in Jenin, said the low priced commodities are luring Palestinian low and medium-income families.

He asserted that this new approach helped improve business a little bit for him, recalling that the ship used to be packed with buyers in this time of the year before Al-Aqsa intifada.

A study conducted by the Palestinian Central Statistics Agency in mid-2002 showed that 2.24 out of 3.2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are living under the poverty line.

It also indicated that 56.5% of  Palestinian families, approximately 318 thousand family, lost half of its income since the unleashing of the 18-month Israeli aggression on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

According to the study, the average income rate which reached 2500 shekels (3000 shekel in the West Bank and 2000 in Gaza) last year, dropped to 1500 shekels in the West Bank in February and 883 shekels in Gaza Strip.

These deteriorating economic conditions lower Palestinians’ ability to meet the basic needs of their families, especially with unemployment rate on the upswing.

Since the beginning of the intifada, more than 360,000 Palestinians have been rendered unemployed with almost two thirds of the entire Palestinian people living under the poverty line.

This is mainly because Israeli occupation forces ban thousands of Palestinian workers from going to their wok places inside the Green Line.

During the latest incursions into Palestinian self-rule areas, Israeli troops slapped curfews over Palestinian towns and villages for weeks, with holed up Palestinians spending all their savings and eventually becoming bankrupt.

The Israeli occupation army did not only impose a water-tight siege on Palestinian areas, but also blocked the delivery of raw materials needed for Palestinian industrial and productive sectors, operating thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli troops also banned all Palestinian exports, forcing businesses to lay off scores of workers in the Palestinian self-rule areas.

Since the beginning of the intifada, Israeli forces have closed all crossings and checkpoints, blocking delivery of food and humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people from neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan.

Faced with these unbearable conditions, Palestinians had to sell their furniture and property to meet the  basic needs of their families.

Suffering under the yoke of Israeli occupation, Palestinians are dreaming for an Eid of liberation.

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