Translated material
The Quartet was left without a representative
And the Palestinians are without money
“In the last two or three months, events have occurred in the Palestinian Authority, which resulted in the emergence of problems that are beyond my competence,” James Wolfensohn explained yesterday his resignation from the post of special representative of the Quartet of international mediators for the Middle East settlement (Russia, USA, EU, UN). He noted that “if the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) collapses, the UN and non-governmental organizations will not be able to fill the vacuum.”Wolfensohn, 72, the former head of the World Bank (WB), who accepted the appointment of the Quartet in June 2005, tried to resolve the financial crisis in the autonomy. It arose as a result of the curtailment of US and EU aid and the cessation of Israeli transfers of customs revenues to the government of the radical Islamic resistance movement Hamas, which won the elections on January 25. The West considers Hamas a terrorist organization and demands that it recognize Israel and begin peace negotiations with it.
France, at the prompting of Wolfensohn, proposed creating a fund under the control of the World Bank, from which money would be transferred to Palestine, bypassing the Hamas government. But this proposal was blocked by the Americans. The autonomy requires $130 million a month (the debt to Palestinian employees, who have not received a salary for the third month, is $116 million), and the Arab countries are ready to allocate only $70 million a month.
In Palestine, the Israelis continue operations against militants, resulting in the death of innocent people. On Sunday in Tulkarm in the West Bank, a 41-year-old Palestinian woman was killed and her two daughters were wounded by stray bullets in a neighboring house during a storming of a house containing an Islamic Jihad activist. Yesterday, two Palestinian policemen were killed when an artillery shell exploded in the Gaza Strip.