Dire Agency –
Shtayyeh intervenes on the visit of Minister Tajani.
RAMALLAH. (West Bank). “We are ready to negotiate a one hundred million euro loan with Italy that could finance large infrastructure projects, such as industrial parks and dams”. So to the agency Dire the prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mohammed Shtayyeh.
The occasion for the declarations, a few days after a visit by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani to Israel and the West Bank, is a meeting with some European journalists in Ramallah.
“We welcome him” says Shtayyeh of the arrival of the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Middle East at the beginning of next week. On the hypothesis of a loan to be negotiated, in principle, the prime minister says he is “grateful”.
More generally, Shtayyeh highlights the importance of the financial contributions guaranteed to the PNA by the countries of the European Union. “I have always dealt with economic development and I know that a country cannot be governed without controlling its resources” the premise. “According to a report presented at a United Nations conference last August, the Occupied Palestinian Territories contribute $50 billion to Israel’s Gross Domestic Product each year, while at the same time the Palestinians lose several billions through lack of access to area “c”, which covers 62 percent of the West Bank”.
Shtayyeh’s reference is to the division into three different zones of the region, occupied by Tel Aviv’s army during the 1967 war. Before the birth of Israel in 1948, Palestine extended over 27,000 square kilometers, later reduced to 6,000. In the West Bank, area “c” is the one where both security and services are under Israeli control and where without Tel Aviv’s authorization the Palestinians cannot carry out infrastructural or economically valuable projects.
The prime minister accuses: “Area “a” is that of the cities, “b” that of the surrounding villages and “c” the rest, where roads or factories should be built but instead cannot be done”. Shtayyeh continues: “Import and export are also controlled by Israel and Israel always collects taxes on our behalf by withholding a portion as management costs, deducting 276 million shekels (about 75 million dollars) this month alone and forcing us to make a deficit”.
According to the prime minister, European cooperation projects are essential in this context. “The growth of our GDP has reached 3.5 percent”, underlines Shtayyeh, “despite paradoxically in the same period we did not have the resources to pay wages and we have not been able to pay them in full for six or seven months”.
