UN Warns of Gaza "Time Bomb"

"We need your generous support, as we need your help to ensure that there is a cessation of hostilities and that there is more access into and out of the Palestinian territories," Egeland said at the opening of a conference of donor nations in Stockholm, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Officials from some 30 countries and some20 international organizations were attending the conference, called to bolster the supply of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian territories, in particular the Gaza Strip.

The conference is hosted by Sweden, Norway and Spain in collaboration with the UN.

The UN has had difficulty raising the 385 million dollars ( 300million euros) deemed necessary to avoid a humanitarian crisis in the wake of the recent upsurge in violence in the region.

"It is many ways incomprehensible that we have only 43 percent of this appeal covered," Egeland said.

He criticised the isolation of the Palestinians, especially the closure of the road linking a supply facility in Karni to Gaza.

According latest UN estimates, there is now a one-month stock of food in densely populated Gaza which relies on external food shipments through border checkpoints which have been periodically closed by Israel.

The World Bank has warned that EU and US aid cuts, following Hamas's landslide parliamentary elections win in January, would adversely impact at least 30 percent of the Palestinian population which is dependent on government salaries.

Unemployment stands at around 45 percent and the World Bank has estimated that two-thirds of the Gaza Strip population (1. 4million) lives under the poverty line, earning less than two dollars a day.

Each square kilometer (0. 4square mile) in Gaza Strip shelters an average of2 , 350Palestinians, making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Collapsing

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) also warned on Friday that the Palestinian economy was collapsing.

"The Gazan economy is collapsing and there is no trust for the future, no investment and no hope," Arnold Vercken, WFP director for Gaza and the West Bank, told Reuters in an interview.

"A signal of hope must be given to the Gazans to re-start the economy. It is a situation of survival."

Infrastructure is also crippled while industries which have formed the backbone of the territory's economy, mainly farming and fishing, are in sharp decline, Vercken said.

"There is no more grain in the four major silos of the four major mills, and even if we are providing food to some of the needy in Gaza, that is15 - 16percent of the population, the trade has completely collapsed," he said.

"Since June no fishing is allowed at all and in fact you come to the fishing port and there is no more smell of fish. This puts out of work about35 , 000people who were living from the fishing industry."

Vercken said the WFP hoped the donor conference, coming on the heels of a Lebanon meeting in Stockholm on Thursday, August31 , which raised more than $ 940million, would secure funding of its relief effort in Gaza.

The body is running a two-year operation in the territory, begun one year ago, which requires funding of $ 103million, just under half of which has been secured.

"We have funding up to two months ahead," Vercken said.

The Israeli army has killed at least200 Palestinians, about half of them civilians, in the Gaza strip since it launched a wide-scale offensive after Palestinian fighters took prisoner a soldier in late June. Palestinians, however, see the assault as a ruse to topple the Hamas-led government.

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