Palestinian Authority two weeks away from financial failure

Washington Post:

A special Middle East envoy, James D. Wolfensohn, has warned international donors that the Palestinian Authority could collapse within two weeks unless fresh funding can be found to pay salaries, clear overdue energy bills and sustain government services financed largely by foreign aid.

In a letter Saturday to senior diplomats from the group of peace interlocutors known as the quartet -- Russia, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations -- Wolfensohn said Israel's decision to withhold revenue from the sales tax and customs fees it collects for the Palestinian Authority had pushed the caretaker government to the brink of insolvency.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's secular Fatah movement currently runs the government. But that will change in a few weeks when Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the E.U., forms the next cabinet. Hamas scored an unexpected victory in parliamentary elections Jan. 25.

Wolfensohn, a former World Bank president and the quartet's envoy to the Middle East, said the Palestinian Authority needed $60 million to $80 million by this week to pay 150,000 civil service employees and trainees, nearly half of them in the security forces. The European Commission, the E.U.'s executive body, agreed Monday to provide $144 million to the Palestinian Authority, designating most of it for social programs and energy bills. About $20 million could be used for salaries.

...

That is one of the problems with being a bunch of beggers who hate the people who are providing the money you need to survive. It is too bad these people do not devote themselves to the enterprise of business rather than to the enterprise of killing Jews.

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