On Monday, the Gaza ministry of health warned that the hospitals and medical clinics in Gaza were in danger of closing because of lack of fuel.
The spokesman for the ministry, Ashraf Kedra, didn’t blame Israel for the shortage of fuel. He said that donors haven’t come through to pay for fuel for these medical facilities. If they would have the money, they could pay for the fuel to be transferred – from Israel.
The article in Palestine Today then gave some interesting statistics:
Gaza has 13 government hospitals and 54 primary health care centers, covering 95% of the medical services provided to more than 2 million Gazans, while the remaining services are covered by UNRWA clinics.
This means that UNRWA has built an entirely parallel medical care system – along with all the buildings, bureaucracy and overhead that this entails – to only cover 5% of the population.
According to UNRWA figures, about two thirds of all Gazans are “refugees” who can get services from the agency.
If that is true, then why do most of them use government medical facilities, and not UNRWA’s?
If UNRWA’s medical budget was redirected to the government then more people could be treated for less money.
Which applies to the clinics and schools in Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan as well. Since by definition none of the citizens of “Palestine” or Jordan are refugees, there is no reason to pour so much money into service provided by a “refugee agency” when it is the proper job of the government to provide those services, like anywhere else in the world.
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