AZZOUN (WEST BANK): Sixty-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Misleh had passed a nervous morning in the dark corridors of the Charity Society offices in the West Bank town of Azzoun waiting for UN supplies of rice, flour, sugar and oil, along with 300 other refugee families.

An aid convoy, the first in three months, had been delayed for two hours while Israeli soldiers searched for the key to open a large steel gate — the only official access into Azzoun since the army blocked it off from the main road with a row of giant concrete blocks many months ago.

Staff from the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA) sat in three trucks on the verge as cars with yellow number plates — Israeli settlers — streamed past on their way to and from Israel and the nearby illegal settlements of Ariel, Immanuel and Kedumim.

Like others, Misleh had heard rumours of the agency’s financial crisis. Its commissioner-general, Peter Hansen, warned last month that UNRWA’s warehouses would be empty of food within weeks unless the international community stumped up some $32 million. So far it has received just $1.5 million.

Agitated and at the head of the queue, Misleh banged repeatedly on the desk where UNRWA staff were checking aid coupons, crying: “I have a wife and two children to feed.” Officials tried to reassure him that his voucher would be honoured.

Not everyone was so lucky. In a neighbouring room a tearful elderly woman pleaded with the Charity Society’s director, Dr Adul Rahman Abu Haniya, to overrule UNRWA staff who had cancelled her coupon. Like dozens of others she had arrived at the UNRWA temporary distribution centre to find that a new rule barring aid to any family containing an UNWRA employee had been imposed in an attempt to make depleted food stocks go further. She had a son working for the agency but said the family had no money left this month for food.

Not so long ago most Palestinians would have considered it shameful to ask outside the family for help, but few can now afford the luxury of restraint, or dignity. Last week, there were scuffles between UNRWA officials and several refugee families as the aid trucks packed up to leave, some of their food still unloaded.

“It is difficult to turn people away when we know how desperately they need food for their children,” said Benyan Tabib, a local official responsible for registering refugees. “People have nothing left to survive on but scraps of aid from the UN, the Palestinian Authority and anyone in their family who is still employed.”

Not many are. According to a forthcoming World Bank report, at least half the West Bank’s adult population and some 70 per cent in Gaza are unemployed.

The loss of jobs in Israel and the shattering of the Palestinian economy which has followed the Israeli army’s security clampdown in reaction to suicide bombings and terrorist violence, have inflicted a grinding poverty on the population. Some 60 per cent live below the poverty line, with most Palestinian families relying on aid handouts.

The poverty is hitting children hardest. The rear windows of the Charity Society look out upon the playground of Azzoun’s junior school, where some 80 children were jostling for places on the climbing frame and a few rides. Most were wearing frayed clothes that had not been washed for days.

Less visible was the damage slowly being inflicted on their bodies by lack of food and a restricted diet. The figures for malnutrition are comparable to Zimbabwe and the Congo. According to a recent study by the UN Agency for International Development, four out of five Palestinian children are anaemic, and half have an insufficient calorie intake and are deficient in vitamin A.

Two factors, says the World Bank report, have slowed the slide into a humanitarian disaster. One has been sustained financial support from the international community, including the work of aid agencies and huge European and Arab donations to the Palestinian Authority.

But the bank’s director in the West Bank and Gaza, Nigel Roberts, warns that the problem is now so grave that even if support were doubled to $2 billion this year — an improbable scenario — the poverty level would fall only marginally. In fact, aid donations, as UNRWA has discovered, are falling dramatically as the world turns its attention to Iraq.

The second factor is the high level of mutual aid inside extended Palestinian families. Breadwinners help poorer relatives, even when they are struggling themselves. But the holes in this family-based welfare net are growing ever larger under the huge strain imposed by the military occupation and internal closures. The 29 months of restricted movement have cost Palestinians $5.4 billion in national income. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.