UNDP chief Achim Steiner has pleaded with Israel to give his agency full access to the devastated territory of Gaza.
He was speaking to CGTN on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development.
#wef25 #worldeconomicforum
He was speaking to CGTN on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development.
#wef25 #worldeconomicforum
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Well, we could do an enormous amount. Now, let us be clear, over the last 15 months one
00:05of the greatest constraints beyond, obviously, the fighting, the killing, the bombardments
00:11has been access. If we are not provided with access to Gaza, we cannot deliver solar-powered
00:16water treatment plants. People need clean drinking water. The infrastructure has largely
00:21been destroyed. We have an economy that probably has lost over 60 years of its development
00:28simply by being bombarded and destroyed. So, our ability to now invest in early recovery
00:34is, one, dependent on access, secondly, on security also, and thirdly, on the ceasefire
00:39holding. We have seen a great deal of tensions continuing through the last few days, but
00:45we have also seen this extraordinary reflex of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians going
00:50back now to the places where they will, first of all, find a pile of rubble. I mean, 60-70
00:56percent of the infrastructure either completely destroyed or damaged. Most of them will not
01:00find a place that they can call home and return to. They will find a destroyed home they have
01:05to start rebuilding. One of the priorities that we have also with the Palestinians and
01:09with the international community identified is the removal of rubble. We estimate that
01:13there are over 40 million tons of rubble in Gaza alone at the moment. We need, you know,
01:20heavy equipment. We need fleets of trucks in order to begin to address this issue, but
01:25even more difficult, in a lot of this rubble there is unexploded ordnance. There are bodies
01:30that have never been removed, landmines. It's an extremely dangerous environment.