RAMALLAH: Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh Monday said that the Ministry of Finance is making all the preparations to pay employees’ salaries within the next two days.
Shtayyeh explained in his speech at the beginning of the weekly Cabinet session today in the city of Ramallah, that there has not yet been an agreement between Norway and Israel to transfer the clearing funds, and that Israel rejects that Norway transfers the funds to the Palestinian Authority, and “therefore, the idea of transferring the funds to Norway does not solve the problem, but it takes the money out of Israel’s hands.”
Regarding the aggression against Gaza, the Prime Minister said that the crimes in Gaza are entering their fifth month, and despite the decision of the International Court of Justice, “the killing has not stopped, and the starvation has not stopped, and the number of victims between dead, missing and wounded has reached approximately 100,000 most of whom are children, women, and the elderly.”
He called on the UN Securi
ty Council and its members to work to stop the genocide and to adopt calls for an immediate halt to the aggression.
In the same context, Shtayyeh called on the Red Cross to repeat the rescue attempt and reveal the fate of the child Hind Rajab, 6, who lost members of her family in Israeli targeting of a vehicle seven days ago, and she is still among the bodies of the slain people, as well as revealing the fate of the ambulance crew that went to rescue her in the Tal al-Hawa area; paramedics Youssef Zaino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun.
Regarding the Rafah crossing, the Prime Minister said that Israel is trying to move the Rafah crossing to another place, and “we say that the Rafah crossing is the gateway to the Palestinian-Egyptian border, and it is an Egyptian-Palestinian affair, and we have had an agreement with the European Police since 2005 to manage the crossing, even if Israel replaces it. It will remain an Egyptian-Palestinian affair, and we will reopen it if Israel closes it.”
Shtayyeh welcomed the important
development in considering a number of colonists as terrorists in the United States, expressing his hope that all countries would follow this trend.
He called for imposing sanctions not only on a small number of colonists, but on the entire colonial project, boycotting colonial goods, and asking colonists with dual American, European, and other nationalities to leave the colonies, because their presence is illegal and illegitimate. He said: “The day before yesterday, Israel announced a project to build 7,000 new colonial units. This matter must also stop.”
The Prime Minister noted that he had received several calls from some of the families of Palestinian students in the Gaza Strip about school and educational plans for their children, to whom he responded: “First, your safety is above everything, and everything can be compensated except the lives of our children and our families. Despite this, all service ministries, including education, water authority, and energy, have clear plans in order to provide eve
rything possible to help our people when the aggression stops.”
Today, the Cabinet discusses developments in the aggression against Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the rest of the Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.
Source: Palestine news and Information Agency – WAFA