2024-04-27 06:38:24
The battered Palestinian economy sinks more every day due to the war between the israeli army and the Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Stripwhich accelerates its strong dependence on Israel.
“Technically, there is no Palestinian economy under Israeli occupation,” explains Adel Samara, an economist at Jerusalem.
“Our economy was annexed by Israel”, points out. The Palestinian economy is framed within a set of rules agreed between Palestinians and Israelis in the Paris Protocol, signed in 1994.
Just like the Oslo Accords under which they were signed, these texts were to be applied for five years, until the creation of a Palestinian state. But the promise was not kept: the economy remains dependent on a roadmap that, over time, has become increasingly inadequate.
“Our economy has a disability,” analyzes Samara, listing the bureaucratic obstacles that Palestinian businessmen face in creating companies, the control of resources by Israel, the limitations to develop agriculture or even tourism.
The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has allowed Israel to strengthen its control over the Palestinian economy, using pre-existing mechanisms, laments the economist. The 1994 texts give Israel exclusive control of Palestinian borders and the collection of import taxes, which it must then pay to the Palestinian Authority, the entity that partially governs West Bank.
But after the attack Hamas in it sure of Israel, which left 1,170 dead, according to an AFP count, the state Hebrew stopped paying the entire customs revenue, claiming that it refused to finance the Islamist movement, in power in Gaza since 2007 and which he considers a “terrorist organization”.
The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, became outraged and refused to receive the rest. Without these funds, the entity “is in difficulty paying the salaries of its officials and its current expenses,” recalls Taher Labadi, a political economy researcher at the French Middle East Institute.
Related
2024-04-27 06:38:24