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JERUSALEM – The actress
and human rights activist Vanessa Redgrave has made an appeal to the
international community to increase its emergency humanitarian
assistance to Palestinians suffering in the occupied Palestinian
territory and to the Government of Israel to ease its movement
restrictions on UN agencies.
Ms Redgrave is making
her first ever visit to Palestine, after nearly 30 years of
campaigning for peace and justice in the Middle East, as a guest of
UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and as
a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF, the UN’s children’s agency. She has
already toured some of the crowded refugee camps of the Gaza Strip,
seeing for herself the conditions in which Palestine refugees live.
She has visited an UNRWA clinic, taken part in a women’s community
discussion about the difficulties of their lives under occupation
and helped tolaunch a UNICEF measles immunization campaign targeting
all children under five in the OPT. Ms Redgrave also visited the
Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation (PYALARA)
and the Children’s Municipal Council in Gaza City.
A planned visit to Rafah to meet some of the more than 15,000 people
made homeless by Israel’s house demolitions there had to be
cancelled because of the internal closure of the Gaza Strip.
In the West Bank, Ms
Redgrave has visited A’Ram and Qalqilya to see the impact of the
barrier on Palestinian communities. Thousands of refugees who rely
on UNRWA’s humanitarian aid will be cut off from humanitarian
services by the barrier.
As part of an
extensive cultural programme, Ms Redgrave and the British violinist
and com poser Stephen Bentley, of the InKlein Quartet, will perform
for Palestinian children at the Kalandia children’s centre in
Kalandia refugee camp. Mr Bentley will also give a violin
masterclass at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music summer
camp at Emmaus village. Ms Redgrave will perform a short programme
of readings at the Al Kasabah Theatre in Ramallah and attend a
performance of the theatre’s production of Smile for Palestine.
At a press conference
in Jerusalem Ms Redgrave appealed to the international community to
contribute more to UNRWA’s Emergency Appeal for the West Bank and
Gaza for 2004. So far only 30 per cent ($62 million out of $209
million) of UNRWA’s needs for the year has been pledged.
UNRWA needs the
funding to provide more than 1 million people in the OPT with food
aid; to create jobs for unemployed breadwinners; re-housing for the
more than 21,000 who have lost their homes in the last three years
and counselling for children traumatised by their experience of
violence.
Ms Redgrave also
highlighted the security restrictions on Gaza that mean UNRWA has
been forced to delay its latest food distribution by three weeks
because of measures imposed by the Israeli authorities on access to
Gaza for UNRWA’s food containers. UNRWA has 250 containers of food
stuck in Ashdod port, and another 800 arriving in the next two
months, while people are going hungry in Gaza. UNRWA needs to be
able to bring 20 containers a day into Gaza and under current
restrictions can only manage 5-6 a day.
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