Yahoo – AFP,
July 23, 2016
Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - The UN is offering tens of thousands of children in the Gaza strip, traumatised by three wars with Israel since 2008, a summer break at play camps throughout the territory.
Palestinian youth draw during a summer camp at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school on July 23, 2016 in Gaza City (AFP Photo/ Mahmud Hams) |
Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - The UN is offering tens of thousands of children in the Gaza strip, traumatised by three wars with Israel since 2008, a summer break at play camps throughout the territory.
Over three
weeks, 165,000 children will attend camps offering play activities and access
to psychologists, said Bo Schack of UNRWA, the United Nations agency
responsible for Palestinian refugees.
Some 2,000
young Palestinian refugees will run the activities at 120 sites, he said.
The latest
round of fighting in Gaza, in 2014, took the lives of 2,251 Palestinians,
including more than 500 children. Seventy-three people were killed on the
Israeli side, including 67 soldiers.
The
violence, which included widespread Israeli air strikes and shelling,
"still affects many children in Gaza", Schack said at a ceremony
launching the camps.
"We
must work harder still to change the lives of these children for the better, to
turn their nightmares into hopes and dreams of a better future," he said.
In 2014,
Sara, now 14, took shelter with her mother and brothers in a UN school while
fighting raged around and above them.
"I
don't like to think about that time, I'd rather go and have fun," she
said.
Palestinian
girls at a summer camp organised at a UNRWA school on July 23,
2016 in Gaza
City (AFP Photo/Mahmud Hams)
|
Dressed in
a traditional embroidered black dress, she was enthusiastic about the camp.
"We
really need to play, to have fun, and summer camps provide us with a good
atmosphere," she told AFP before slipping away to join her friends.
About 75
percent of the coastal strip's residents are refugees.
For the
past three years, cash-strapped UNRWA has cancelled its previously annual
seaside summer camps for lack of funding.
It now
holds activities in its own schools.
It says the
total cost of this year's three-week programme is $2.3 million (2.1 million
euros).
For Hossam,
12, the camps are worth it.
"I'm
happy to be here with my friends, he said. "We're going to play
football."
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