- The last 10 days have seen one of the most intense periods
of destruction by the Israeli military in Gaza since the start of the Intifada,
with more than 100 homes flattened and 1,100 people left homeless, the
main United Nations agency helping Palestinian refugees said today.
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- According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees (UNRWA), the Israeli military has demolished or damaged beyond
repair 131 residential buildings since the start of May, bringing to 17,594
the total number of people who have lost their homes in Gaza.
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- The majority of the demolitions have taken place in Rafah
in the south, where 11,215 people have already been made homeless by demolitions
since the beginning of the current strife in September 2000, and in the
region of the Kissufim Road, where a Palestinian attack on 2 May left an
Israeli mother and her four children dead.
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- UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen said the Agency
condemned "without reservation the 2 May killings, as it does the
killing of innocent Palestinians and their children, as international law
simply forbids collective punishment."
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- "The overwhelming majority of the more than 17,000
Palestinians who have lost their homes in Gaza since the start of the intifada
have been guilty of nothing more than living in the wrong place at the
wrong time," he said.
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- UNRWA, the largest humanitarian operation in the occupied
Palestinian territory, has been providing those who have lost their homes
with water, food, blankets and cash assistance. With funding from donors
the Agency has been able to build new shelters in safe places for several
hundred of the homeless families, but its resources are unable to meet
the growing humanitarian crisis faced by those without shelter.
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- http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=10675&Cr=UNRWA&Cr1=
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