Gaza children stressed, desperate and in danger: UNICEF
Posted: April 21, 2011 by
crescentandcross
Israel’s near five years
blockade on the Gaza Strip causes extensive poverty, endemic
unemployment and 80 percent of Gazans to be dependent on aid handouts
Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip has left the isolated
Palestinian territory’s children stressed, desperate and in poverty,
forcing some to do dangerous and deadly work, UNICEF said Tuesday.
While there is no humanitarian
crisis in Gaza, Israel’s blockade means there is extensive poverty,
endemic unemployment and that 80 percent of Gazans are dependent on aid
handouts, said UNICEF spokeswoman Catherine Weibel.
Children under 18, around half
the estimated 1.5 million population of the territory governed by
Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, are the most affected, the United
Nations children’s agency spokeswoman told journalists.
While 90 percent of Gazan children are educated poverty still obliges many to
work.
They work often in “danger
zones” such as smuggling tunnels running under the border from Egypt
aimed at defying the Israeli blockade.
To keep working in the tunnels, which could collapse, be bombed or gassed, many
youths take Tramadol painkillers, Weibel said.
Children also work as scrap
collectors, scavenging for metal or other materials among the ruins in
the buffer zone near the Israeli border where “Israel shoots
systematically at anything that moves,” Weibel said.
“Children are wounded or killed
every week,” she said, stressing the despair of adolescents who “don’t
know what they will become and have the feeling that they’re cut off
from the rest of the world.”
“There has been an explosion in
the number of children killed on both sides of the border” since the
start of the year, she said.
In 2010, 11 Palestinian children
were killed and 360 wounded in the Gaza Strip and Israeli-occupied West
Bank. Three Palestinian children were killed and 64 wounded in January
and February.
On March 22, two Palestinian
children were killed in an Israeli strike as they played football in
front of their home in Gaza City.
On Sunday, an Israeli teenager who was seriously wounded in an April 7 rocket
attack from Gaza died.
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/gaza-children-stressed-desperate-and-in-danger-unicef/#more-6616
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