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Israel Activates Economic Measures In Favor of Palestinian Authority

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh unveils the cornerstone for the Palestine wheat silos project in the village of Burham. (Wafa)
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh unveils the cornerstone for the Palestine wheat silos project in the village of Burham. (Wafa)
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Israel Activates Economic Measures In Favor of Palestinian Authority

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh unveils the cornerstone for the Palestine wheat silos project in the village of Burham. (Wafa)
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh unveils the cornerstone for the Palestine wheat silos project in the village of Burham. (Wafa)

The Israeli government began to offer a number of economic facilities to the Palestinian Authority, lately approved under heavy pressure from Washington.

Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported on Sunday that Israel has recently slashed the gasoline tax it had been collecting from the Palestinian Authority by 50%, and has taken other measures to ease the financial situation in Ramallah.

Israeli authorities decided to collect a 1.5% gasoline tax instead of 3% from the PA, a measure that will save the Authority some 80 million shekels ($20 million) on an annual basis, according to the newspaper.

In 2023, the Israeli cabinet had taken other steps to support the Palestinian Authority's economy. These efforts include increased tax payments in favor of the PA, which now average 730 million shekels per month, compared to around half a million three years ago.

Early this year, the cabinet had announced it approved lowering the so-called “blue tax” that it levies from the PA on fuel transfers from three percent to 1.5%; raising the percentage of revenues it transfers to Ramallah from the fees it collects from travelers at the Allenby border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan; and expanding the list of tax-free imports that it facilitates on the PA’s behalf.

The Israeli government has only implemented the preliminary measures, while it said the list of tax-free imports will be updated later through the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Economic Committee.

The Committee was established under the Oslo Accords, with an aim to regulate the economic relations between Israel and the PA.

It has not convened since 2009, as a result of the political tension between the parties

The PA demands that Israel implements all three measures. Israel had previously refused, but lately accepted under ongoing pressure from the administration of US President Joe Biden.

Israeli officials said that Israeli far-right ministers, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees the Tax Authority and the Civil Administration in Israel, also approved this decision. They said the move aligns with the Biden administration's call to improve the economic situation in the Palestinian Authority, which is believed to be on the brink of economic collapse.

The three measures could add millions of dollars to the coffers of the PA, currently going through a deteriorating financial crisis, the worst since its establishment.

For the second consecutive year, the Palestinian Authority is paying partial salaries to most of its employees due to the crisis.

Last July, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet decided that Israel would work to prevent the collapse of the PA.

The Israeli government withholds huge amounts of money in tax revenues on the PA’s behalf and hands them to the families of Israelis killed in Palestinian attacks.

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”