The purpose of the aid is to provide access to food, healthcare, hygiene, and water. This amount pales in comparison to the recently sent military aid package to Ukraine of over 7 billion kronor.
At the same time, support for UNRWA, the UN's relief agency for Palestinian refugees, remains suspended. A partial report on the potential involvement of a few employees in Hamas as well as the attack on October 7th will be released at the end of March. Until then, Sida refuses to provide any humanitarian aid to the organization. This is happening while 2.2 million Palestinians are living in acute famine and 90% of children under five suffer from at least one infectious disease.
We communists are generally skeptical of humanitarian aid. In the way it is often structured, it represents another step in submission to the countries of the imperialist core. Instead of building infrastructure and providing tools for self-sufficiency in these countries, aid recipients are tied to a dependency on one-time shipments of food and medicine. But in some cases, where people's immediate survival depends on external assistance, we see humanitarian aid as a pure necessity. It is blatantly obvious that Gaza is such a case.
Therefore, it is completely unreasonable for Sida to wait almost a full month to decide on payments to UNRWA. To do this at a time when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are starving is to directly become complicit in the ongoing genocide. It is to rally behind the long-term project of the Israeli terrorist state: to slowly exterminate and expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
RKU therefore demands an immediate resumption of support for UNRWA – for the well-being and survival of the Palestinian people, against Zionist occupation!
Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Youth
2024-02-23
