It’s the conflict in the Middle East that many have already forgotten.
But more than 100,000 Palestinians have been left homeless by the fifty days of fighting between Israel and Hamas militants.
Robert Turner, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, addressed MEPs in Brussels in a bid to drum up EU support ahead of an international donors conference on October 12th.
“Europe can play an important role. Europe is Israel’s largest trading partner and the largest donor to the Palestinian Authority. Europe has huge influence on both of those parties and needs to utilize that influence. Europe should not just be a payer but they also need to be a significant player in this exercise,” Turner told euronews.
“For building material to be available we have to have the Palestinian Authority’s national consensus government on the ground. We need to have them controlling the crossings, controlling the men in streets, that needs to happen before there will be any building material. Hopefully, in the Conference in Cairo, the donors will be generous on that, but I think there is a real concern that in the absence of any political solution, why rebuild?”
More than 2,000 Palestinians died in the fighting, many of them civilians, according to the UN.
Seventy-two Israelis also lost their lives.
