United Nations Radio

The UN agency assisting Palestinian refugees in Gaza, known as UNRWA, is today appealing for 34 million dollars as needs there mount on this fifth day of Israeli air strikes. UNRWA says the attacks have inflicted considerable damage to an already fragile public infrastructure, and the appeal will enable it to provide essential supplies including food, fuel and medicine. On Tuesday afternoon I spoke on the line to Gaza with the agency's head, Karen AbuZayd.

UNRWA Chief, Karen AbuZayd

KAREN: Well, we're pretty much stuck in our compound. But what we understand is there is certainly a lot of buildings that are missing that were once here. Right now they've just started bombing the ministries again that they bombed last night in the middle of the night. So we expect that there's a lot of destruction out there of important institutions, as in the university which is right near us.

DIANNE: We understand that a number of trucks were able to come into Gaza with food and medicine. Was it distributed already?

KAREN: Oh heavens, no! (chuckles) The whole process takes quite a lot of time. it's a military crossing and what happens is Israeli trucks come in, dump off the goods onto the ground and then go away, and then the Palestinian trucks are allowed in to load up again and then come off. We are going to try to get things out as quickly as we can. We've been getting out some of our medicines that have come in to our hospitals and to our clinics. We're trying to establish some emergency centres just in case there is a second phase or a ground invasion in case people need to have somewhere to flee to and to take refuge in, and we're just trying to do things as quickly as we can.

DIANNE: Speaking about a possible ground invasion: During the press conference with the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and John Holmes, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator, there was mention about the psychological effects of this possibility.

KAREN: This is pretty serious. This has been going on since the beginning of the intifadah, and it was in the year 2000. For the children and even many adults, the constant conflict and the constant violence and the threat of your home being demolished as happened during the intifadah, or the constant bombing and noise and keeping up all night, these are things that have bothered the whole population. Men are particularly affected: 120,000 of them used to work in Israel and since the beginning of that intifadah they have been unemployed for the most part-and this is very hard for people not to be able to take care of their families. We found that our psycho-social programmes had to treat or take account of the needs of men as well as the children that we first started the programme for. Now, what's happening is it's just of course gotten worse and worse. The intifadah is sort of over but then came all the siege when Hamas won the elections and the siege is increasingly tightened over these past three years and been especially bad since last June. And now people are being in the middle of a conflict again, with the worst violence that they've ever seen. I think all my staff who are coming into the office these days are telling me about their children. Their children are just terrified because we're all up at night because it's so noisy and it's scary.

DIANNE: For the anniversary of the 60th anniversary (of) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights you wrote an op-ed that appeared in several newspapers. What message would you like people to know?

KAREN: Our message this year for the anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights was to ask people to take a look again at that declaration and see where the Palestinians fit in to that because if you look at the 28 articles, not one of them really applies to Palestinians. And I think it's kind of a wake up call for what's been happening to these people for 60 years.  We ourselves at UNRWA are beginning the commemoration of our 60 years of existence, which is much too long for a refugee organization that's taking care of one group of refugees, and we're going to commemorate it with a number of events.  It's not a great time to talk about it what's happening in Gaza, but we would like to show the resilience of the Palestinians and the things they've been able to achieve despite being refugees and in exile, and without any human rights really for 60 years. It's been quite an achievement when you see how they've gotten their education, how popular they are around the world because they are so talented and so hardworking and so well educated.

PRES: Karen AbuZayd is Commissioner General of UNRWA: The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees.

Producer: Dianne Penn
Duration: 4'23")