(Jordan Times) Omar Karmi - With the calm prevailing, in Gaza people's thoughts have moved away from survival to work. Hasan Namle, 51, remembers when he used to work in Israel and could make as much as NIS6,000 ($1,400) a month in the construction field. Now he runs a small poultry shop and makes around NIS1,000 a month. "If they would take me back [to work in Israel] I would go," he says. They won't. On March 8, Israeli chief-of-staff Moshe Yaalon told a security conference: "Our goal is to stop any kind of Palestinian working in Israel by 2008. This is our policy, this is our political directive, and this is because of what has happened here over the last four-and-a-half years." The PA's public sector wage bill in 2003 accounted for 59% of its total expenditure, and only because of a doubling of international aid - a total that per capita is now "a record in the annals of foreign assistance," the World Bank's Nigel Roberts wrote recently - was the PA able to foot the bill.
2005-04-28 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive