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| Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad gestures during an interview with The Associated Press in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Sunday, Jan. 6, 2013. Fayyad is blaming Arab countries that haven’t delivered promised financial aid for an escalating financial crisis in the Palestinian territories. In an interview Sunday Fayyad said that the cash crunch is pushing an additional 25 percent of the Palestinian population, or 1 million people, into poverty. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed) |
| Associated Press
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — The Palestinian self-rule government
is in "extreme jeopardy" because of an unprecedented financial crisis,
largely because Arab countries have failed to send hundreds of millions
of dollars in promised aid, the Palestinian prime minister said Sunday.
The cash crunch has gradually worsened in recent years, and the Palestinian Authority now has reached the point of not being able to pay the salaries of about 150,000 government employees, Salam Fayyad
told The Associated Press. The number of Palestinian poor is bound to
quickly double to 50 percent of the population of roughly 4 million if
the crisis continues, he said.
"The status quo is not sustainable," Fayyad said in an interview at his West Bank office.
The Palestinian Authority, set up two decades ago as part of interim peace deals with Israel,
is on the "verge of being completely incapacitated," Fayyad warned.
Only a year ago, he said he expected to make great strides in weaning
his people off foreign aid.
The self-rule government was
meant to be temporary and replaced by a state of Palestine, which was to
be established through negotiations with Israel. However, those talks
repeatedly broke down, and for the past four years the two sides have
been unable to agree on the terms of renewing the negotiations....READ MORE
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