CAIRO: The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes was in Gaza last Friday to assess the extent of required urgent humanitarian aid to the Strip following the Israeli offensive that started on Dec. 27 and ended on Jan. 17.
Holmes was in Cairo Sunday and sat down with Daily News Egypt to discuss the situation in Gaza, a situation he described as shocking.
Daily News Egypt: You stated that you were shocked by what you saw in Gaza, can you give a more personal account of what you saw there?
John Holmes: What was shocking to me was the extent of the destruction.
Some of the things that shocked me most was an industrial area I went to in Jebaliya, where everything had been bulldozed within an radius of a kilometer, warehouses, factories, houses, everything. It was a very shocking thing to see.
Then going to see the American school in Gaza which had been hit by a missile and effectively destroyed. Standing in front of it with the headmaster and the pupils who said this was our school and this is our life and we turn up one morning and look at it, it’s gone. That was something I described at the time as sickening because again it’s the future of Gaza just destroyed in an apparently casual fashion.
As someone who has often visited areas of conflict, did you find a difference in the types of locations that were destroyed in Gaza?
It’s a very particular kind of conflict in Gaza, and a lot of the damage we saw was caused by bulldozers, so deliberate destruction of property. I’m sure the Israelis would argue these areas were being used for rocket launching or manufacture, but there’s also this issue they’ve talked about of deterrence, to demonstrate that if you fire rockets at us we will do this to you. That’s something quite shocking to see on the ground, the effects of it.
What is worse in a way than all that is talking to some of the people who survived, funnily enough, even talking just to the survivors in one of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) schools that were taking shelter there. Where were they going to go [when] they had nothing to go back to?
How much of an influence will the current political complications have on the job you are trying to do?
Well I hope it won’t have an influence on what we’re trying to do in the short-term with the emergency humanitarian needs. The division between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas has been there for 18 months in its full form and we have been able to go on working. We have been able to work in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority but also working with Hamas people on the ground in order to do what we have to help people.
The crossings have got to be opened in a completely different way from what we’ve seen in the past two years. I hope we can avoid the political problems on the humanitarian side, but for the longer term the only solution is Palestinian reunification and a national unity government. Without that the international community will find it impossible to do any serious long-term reconstruction. And of course ideally you would like to have a peace settlement that will end the occupation because that’s the fundamental problem.
Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said that the issue of tunnels cannot be addressed without opening the crossings. You are also calling for the opening of the crossings, do you concur with this view?
If the crossing points are not open, then people are going to resort to tunnels because they have to get goods in, so the tunnels come into operation. Some people make a lot of money out of it and goods come in that way.
Conversely, if you close down the tunnels, you have to open the crossing points because otherwise goods will not come in; people will not be able to live. Even to exist, never mind live; live is a big ambition in Gaza at the moment.
We need the crossing points not just for humanitarian purposes, but commercially in the normal way. Exports are very important; industry is dead at the moment. We don’t want to create a population that is dependent on aid. That’s why you need commercial goods going, industry [revived], and people there having jobs which are not in Hamas controlled public authorities but are private sector jobs and that should be in everybody’s interest.
In your talks with the Israeli side, was there any sign of contrition for the bombings of UN schools and the apparent use of white phosphorous which is banned in civilian settings?
The Israeli side has said they regret those attacks but they have their own explanation because they say there were militants using the schools or [sites] nearby [to launch attacks] and we have said we were not aware of that so there is an argument we still need to have on that. And we want the fullest possible investigation on that.
In the first place the Israelis must investigate and tell us what they discover and then we see whether we need some kind of investigation as well and what kind of action we need to talk about, for example compensation.
These are all questions which arise because we lost a lot of people and damage and so on. We will pursue that very vigorously with Israelis and we will not simply let it go.
On the question of white phosphorous, we have no doubt that white phosphorous was being used, not necessarily as weapons but for smokescreens apparently, and that is not itself banned, as I understand it, by international law but their use in populated areas – and white phosphorous is a horrible substance – that would be in my view condemned if it were being used. The UNRWA compound was set on fire by white phosphorous shells, we don’t have any doubt about that and that is in a populated area so there are real questions to answer there.
Is Israel a partner you feel you can deal with, because there seems to be a level of aggravation between Israel and the UN, besides the consistent flaunting of Security Council resolutions, lately 1850, and the bombing of UN buildings which they were given the coordinates to, even on the day Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was there?
We are very concerned, if they are not [taking into account] Security Council resolutions and acting in the way you described. Regrettably they are not the only country in the world that doesn’t instantly obey Security Council resolutions, but that’s not an excuse. We think they should take notice of them immediately. I would find it very hard to believe that they deliberately attacked the UN compound while the Secretary General was in Israel. They say it was not deliberate; they certainly had the coordinates of the UNRWA compound. Their version of events is that they were attacked by people in or close to the compound and they were retaliating and the shells fell in the wrong place. I guess that is what their version will be, and that’s why we need to look at it.
We need to find ways of relating to Israel which are effective. The relationship between the UN as an institution and Israel is not an easy one, has not been an easy one, but we have to try and work together to make some progress in all these areas.
