TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — The United Arab Emirates pledged Thursday to offer $15 million to assist rebuild the Jenin refugee camp after probably the most intense Israeli army operation within the occupied West Bank in almost twenty years.
The funding promise comes after the two-day offensive destroyed the camp’s slender roads and alleyways. The operation, meant to crack down on Palestinian militants after a sequence of current assaults on Israelis, despatched hundreds of individuals fleeing their properties. Twelve Palestinians and one Israeli soldier had been killed within the combating.
The UAE’s state-run WAM information company reported that the cash could be granted to UNRWA, the U.N. company that assists Palestinian refugees, to rebuild broken properties and companies and for the company’s companies. UNRWA has struggled not too long ago to lift the funding it must maintain its day-to-day operations serving to thousands and thousands of individuals throughout the Middle East.
Israel’s fierce incursion this week noticed bulldozers tearing by way of streets to clear a path for the a whole lot of troopers deployed. Israel withdrew its troops on Wednesday, revealing a scene of destruction.
Roads within the densely populated space of some 24,000 individuals had been chewed up, with piles of damaged asphalt, stones and rocks mendacity on the edges. Cars, some overturned on the edges of roads, had been smashed and scorched.
UNRWA mentioned a few of its personal services, together with the home windows and partitions of a well being heart and the highway main up its college, sustained harm.
At a donor convention final month, UNRWA fundraising fell wanting the $300 million it mentioned was essential to proceed aiding Palestinians, with nations pledging simply $107 million. The shortfall got here even after the United Nations chief mentioned UNRWA “is on the verge of financial collapse.”
Israel launched the invasion within the camp, lengthy often called a bastion of Palestinian militants, on Monday, saying its purpose was to destroy and confiscate weapons. It carried out airstrikes and despatched in a whole lot of troops in an operation that was harking back to the bloody interval twenty years in the past often called the second intifada, or Palestinian rebellion in opposition to Israel’s open-ended occupation.
Some of the scenes from Jenin, together with large military bulldozers tearing by way of camp alleys, had been eerily just like these from a serious Israeli incursion in 2002, which lasted for eight days and have become often called the battle of Jenin.
The operations, twenty years aside, had been meant to crush militant teams within the camp and deter and stop assaults on Israelis. In every case, the military claimed success, solely to be dragged into new cycles of army raids and Palestinian assaults.
Many Palestinians see the actions of the gunmen as an inevitable results of 56 years of occupation and the absence of any political course of with Israel. They additionally level to elevated West Bank settlement building and violence by extremist settlers.
The large-scale raid comes amid a greater than yearlong spike in violence that has created a problem for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right authorities. His coalition is dominated by ultranationalists who’ve known as for harder motion in opposition to Palestinian militants solely to see the combating worsen.
Over 140 Palestinians have been killed this 12 months within the West Bank, and Palestinian assaults concentrating on Israelis have killed at the very least 25 individuals, together with a capturing final month that killed 4 settlers.
Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip within the 1967 Mideast warfare. The Palestinians search these territories for his or her hoped-for unbiased state.
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