About 150 people gathered Monday evening in Withers Hall to listen to Bill Corcoran, president and CEO of American Near East Refugee Aid discuss humanitarian efforts in the Gaza Strip and Lebanese refugee camps and give insights regarding the future of the region.
Organized by NC State students and the Coalition for Peace with Justice, the event centered on refugee families living in Gaza and the Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
The event began with Corcoran describing what ANERA does and the severity of problems Palestinians face.
“Gaza Strip is an area about the size of DC, and the density of people living there is greater than the density in Hong Kong,” Corcoran said.
According to Corcoran, 1.8 million people live in the Gaza Strip, and 80 percent of them earn only $1 a day. The average Gazan family has about seven children.
Some of the projects ANERA was recently working on involved repairing preschools and water infrastructure, according to Corcoran, but the projects faced setbacks after not being able to get any building materials into the area due to the conflict in 2014.
“One of the issues we have there right now is that in order to do large-scale water projects there we need cement and steel piping,” Corcoran said. “They are not allowed in Gaza. Israel has to approve every bag of cement and steel piping that comes into Gaza. That takes several months for that to process. The war ended in August, and we have not been able to do any significant water projects in Gaza because we are waiting on approvals.”
Corcoran compared the 2014 conflict with the one in 2009 and noted that the debris was four times more than it was in 2009.
“In 2009, the targets were Hamas offices and government offices,” Corcoran said. “This time they were homes, factories and apartments. One of the staff lost 22 members of his family during the war because they were all in the same apartment building that was destroyed. Before the war, cement was $100 a ton, and after the war it was $1,000 a ton. Two days ago UN had to suspend a repair program because they ran out of money.”
Corcoran talked about donor fatigue that has also been slowing efforts in helping the region. After one preschool was destroyed that ANERA helped restore, donors in Dubai were unwilling to help rebuild it.
“I just came from Dubai, and I was asking for money for projects here, and all they are saying is ‘We are tired—how long do we keep doing this and keep rebuilding?’ There is a fatigue among donors,” Corcoran said.
Corcoran also talked about the Syrian refugee situation in Lebanon. According to Corcoran, 39 percent of the population, or 1.3 million people, in Lebanon are Syrian refugees.
“Seventy-five percent of the Syrian children are not in school at this present time,” Corcoran said. “And, in fact, they haven’t been in school for three years. Friends at UNICEF gave us a grant to work with Syrian children just so they learn Arabic. Lebanese culture expects you to know French, English and Arabic, so what future do these kids have?”
Corcoran stressed how the goal of ANERA is to development projects with long-term benefits such as focusing on education and water infrastructure, but the recent developments forced ANERA to focus mainly on humanitarian aid.
“We like development projects, not Band-Aids, but we can’t because the wars force us to just keep them alive,” Corcoran said.
However, some of the projects have seen some success despite the conflicts.
“We started a sports program,” Corcoran said. “We hired some of the best coaches we could find in Lebanon to teach people in refugee camps sports, and we taught nonviolence. The end result was that for the first time in years there hasn’t been as much fighting.”
Many of the audience members came from across the state to listen to the event, some with personal ties to the topic.
“To be honest, I liked that they put up pictures, but I wished they got more in depth and how families and children and mothers are living since they don’t have the male head of household to protect them and support them,” said Hanine Mohamed, a sophomore at Johnston Community College who is transferring to NC State.
“I think it should be called a holocaust; it’s more of a holocaust than war,” Mohamed said in regards to the 2014 war with Israel and Palestine.
Students saw the event as an opportunity to learn more about what was going on and help.
“It was really enlightening,” said Lindsey Rosenbaum, a senior studying international studies and one of the event’s organizers. “The facts are sobering, and they are important facts. If we are overlooking them, then it means people’s lives are being overlooked.”
