Nablus- Statements issued by the Palestinian Ministry of Health sounded the alarm about the crises facing the health sector that have not only led to a decline in its services, but also warned of its complete collapse, due to the occupation’s measures, its seizure of Palestinian funds, and its prevention of further payments.
The cumulative debt of the Ministry of Health reached 2.7 billion shekels (dollar = 3.7 shekels) until the end of last May, in addition to the loss of 13% of essential medicines from the ministry’s warehouses, and what is available is barely enough for the coming period, according to statements by the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Health to the news agency. Palestinian official Wael Al-Sheikh.
The deterioration that the health sector is witnessing is no less serious than the damage to the educational sector, the second pillar of the Palestinian Authority after health, as well as the economic sector, where more than 29% of its facilities have been disrupted, or their production has declined in the West Bank, while it has stopped completely in Gaza.
Escalation policy
Israel is besieging the Palestinian Authority financially, and refuses to hand over clearance funds, which are tax funds that Israel collects on behalf of the Authority in exchange for 3%, and is estimated at about 188 million dollars per month, of which it withholds more than 6 billion shekels from before the war, and even deducts part of that money randomly. Illegal as a punitive approach to the Palestinians.
Clearance funds constitute 70% of the Authority’s financial revenues, and with Israel preventing them and the scarcity of external support at the same time, the situation worsened and worsened, to the point where the Palestinian Authority became, for the third year in a row, unable to pay a full salary to employees, as they received between 80% and 50% of their salaries. The authority now owes employees and various financial sectors, especially banks, about $11 billion.
Between this and that, Israel continues on the ground to impose its escalatory policies against the Palestinians, both popularly and officially, to restrict them. It increased the pace of settlement and canceled the decision to disengage by returning to settlements in the northern West Bank that it vacated in 2005.
Settler attacks also increased by more than 37% after October 7, 2023, compared to the same time period last year, as more than 100,000 settlers armed themselves and launched attacks in which they killed many Palestinians, and Israel confiscated more than 27,000 dunums (a dunam is equal to 1,000). square meters) of the West Bank, and hindered the lives of citizens and their movement through hundreds of mobile and fixed checkpoints.
Schemes to end power
Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, comments that the “Israeli and American financial blockade” on the Palestinian Authority and the occupation’s decision to prevent it from giving it any of its financial dues, which has become declared and adopted by the Israeli right, aims to “end the existence of the Palestinian Authority.”
Abu Youssef explains that the matter went beyond being “piracy and theft of clearing funds” to committing crimes of purification, extermination, and displacement of Palestinians, as the Israeli occupation aims – according to him – to separate Gaza from the West Bank to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state as a strategic goal, in addition to striking Palestinian representation within the framework of The PLO, and the Palestinian Authority framework as its arm.
He adds, “Therefore, Israel wants to undermine the Palestinian Authority, and return to occupation and settler colonialism, and everything related to spreading chaos among the Palestinian people, ending them, and displacing them,” but he confirms that the Palestinians will not surrender to the occupation’s plans, “and they have thwarted, with their steadfastness and valiant resistance, the process of displacement from the West Bank to Jordan, and from Gaza to Sinai.
All Palestinian
Israel’s restrictions on the Authority are part of its comprehensive war on the Palestinians in general, in the opinion of academic and political analyst Dr. Akl Salah, as he believes that it falls within the systematic war on the West Bank since 2017 specifically, when Israel began withdrawing the Authority’s powers and giving the majority of them to the security coordinator or the Israeli military governor. To the bank.
Salah adds to Tel Aviv Tribune Net that the occupation government and the extremist religious movement consider that “the West Bank is an integral part of the State of Israel,” and that the presence of the Palestinian Authority conflicts politically with its future plans, and that its role is no more than a service aspect, in which it sponsors education and health for the Palestinians, in addition to another role. Related to security coordination with the occupation.
Salah says that the methodology for Israel to control the West Bank and end the presence of the Authority there takes into account two factors, the first of which is strategic and ideological, which enjoys the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to maintain himself in power, and is based on unleashing the extreme Zionist right to carry out its crimes and settlements, and restricting the authority financially and administratively. The second is the restriction of the “Palestinian entity”, which existed with the existence of the Authority in the first place.
All of this, according to Salah, requires the Palestinian Authority to take a serious stance based on halting security coordination and cutting it off completely, healing the rift and achieving national unity, and most importantly, supporting the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and providing the necessary solutions for that.
Dismantling power
The Israeli position on the Palestinian Authority and its vision for its existence, according to what Azzam Abu Adas, a specialist in Israeli affairs, explains, is divided into two levels. The first is a security level that wants to complete the Authority’s project as profitable and saves a lot of effort. “For them, the Authority is a hen that lays security eggs,” and the second: a politician represented by the extreme right who does not see The Arabs are not warring tribes, with no organizer or body, even if that political body is ideologically loyal to Israel.
Abu Adass added to Tel Aviv Tribune Net that what worries that right is the world’s recognition of a Palestinian state, which will make the dismantling of authority a goal for it, and replace it with multiple entities, so that there is no unified body for the world to talk to.
The disintegration of the Authority is considered a disintegration of the idea of Palestinian society. Despite its “poor quality and poor political performance” – according to Abu Adas – it remains a body that regulates the lives of the Palestinians, and getting rid of it means spreading patterns of chaos, including their displacement.
Abu Al-Adas says that the idea of the Israeli right has begun to crystallize publicly, by making Palestine between the river and the sea an unlivable environment. It destroyed Gaza and turned it into an environment that excludes living, and spread crime within the Palestinian interior, and now it is working to frustrate the authority and dismantle it into more chaotic and corrupt entities.