Palestinian children living in poverty
By IANSMonday, May 10, 2010
JERUSALEM - Three out of four Palestinian children in East Jerusalem live below the poverty line, a report has said.
The survey conducted by an Israeli rights group, Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said the majority of the 300,000 Palestinians, including 95,000 children, in East Jerusalem live in increasing poverty.
Only one out of 10 Palestinians in the area has access to social services. Almost 160,000 others have no access to the city’s water and sewage network, Iranian Press TV reported.
The rights group blamed Israel’s decades-long policy of “systematically neglecting and discriminating” against Palestinians.
“Israel’s policy for the past four decades has taken concrete form as discrimination in planning and construction, expropriation of land, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure, government and municipal services,” the report said.
Israel has seized more than one-third of the Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, on which it has built more than 50,000 homes for Israeli settlers.
There is also a shortage of around 1,000 classrooms, the report said, adding that garbage collection is sporadic and that there were no regular postal services.
