Word: gaza
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...private sessions with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. For the most part, in these meetings, he has been composed and restrained. But on one issue Obama has openly expressed frustration, aides familiar with the meetings say: the inability to get humanitarian aid to civilians affected by the war in Gaza...
...harder line positions on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, the prospect of bridging the gap between the two camps looks more remote than it has in eight years. Looking for a way into the problem, the U.S. and the international community are starting with delivering help to Gaza. On Monday, Clinton will attend an Arab-sponsored summit at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that aims to organize and fund the reconstruction of the devastated Palestinian enclave. The enormous suffering of civilians during the war makes the humanitarian mission a worthy end in itself...
...starters, Washington refuses to deal with Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza and is on the U.S. list of terrorist entities. Until now, the U.S. had backed an economic blockade of Gaza in the hopes of toppling Hamas. Now the State Department is offering to pump something in the range of $900 million in humanitarian assistance into the enclave, but there is probably no way large amounts of aid money can be distributed in Gaza without at least indirectly helping Hamas. No other Palestinian organizations have the infrastructure to put that money to use, and the international agencies that...
...Humanitarian aid does little to help the U.S.'s medium-term goals in Gaza: curtailing the flow of arms to Hamas and boosting the Palestinian Authority there. And in fact, the lack of progress on those goals undermines the good that the aid itself can achieve. "In order for the humanitarian response to be as effective as possible, you need a solution to smuggling [of weapons into Gaza by Hamas] and you need a solution to divided authority [between Hamas and Fatah]," admits one senior State Department official. But none of the money the U.S. plans to pledge...
...furtherance of the simple moral goal of helping thousands of people in need - or more cynically, in pursuit of the p.r. win that might come from being seen to do so. But much of the money pledged at Sharm el-Sheikh may never go to helping Palestinians in Gaza. At a conference in Paris in late 2007, the international community started a pledge drive that eventually totaled $7.7 billion in proposed aid to the Palestinians. By September 2008, only $1.4 billion had gone to the Palestinian Authority, according to French diplomat Pierre Duquesne, thanks to the difficulty of distributing...