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UNRWA / 60TH ANNIVERSARY ADVANCER
STORY: UNRWA / 60TH ANNIVERSARY ADVANCER
TRT: 3.59
SOURCE: UNRWA / UNTV
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 18 SEPTEMBER 2009 / FILE / ARCHIVE
ARCHIVE – UNRWA - 1949, JORDAN
1. Wide shot, Palestine refugees in tent camps
2. Wide shot, family by tent
ARCHIVE – UNRWA - 1948
3. Med shot, burning house during 1948 war
ARCHIVE – UNRWA - 1949, GAZA
4. Wide shot, crowd at food distribution
ARCHIVE – UNRWA - 1949, JORDAN
5. Med shot, two ladies
6. Med shot, two girls with swollen bellies
7. Wide shot, sick child in tent
8. Wide shot, people among tents
9. Close up, sick girl
ARCHIVE – UNRWA - 1949, GAZA
10. Various shots, food distribution
FILE – UNRWA - JANUARY 2009, GAZA
11. Various shots, people fleeing along Gaza street
12. Pan, crowded UNRWA school serving as shelter
13. Various shots, UNRWA workers with trucks by warehouse, food distribution
FILE – UNRWA - FEBRUARY 2009, GAZA
14. Med shot, health clinic
15. Wide shot, kids in school uniforms walking among rubble
16. Various shots, kids in schoolyard; teacher close to boy, listening
17. Wide shot, schoolyard packed with kids
UNTV – 18 SEPTEMBER 2009, NEW YORK CITY
18. SOUNDBITE (English) Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)
“We’re not celebrating as we say, you can’t celebrate sixty years of refugees, but to commemorate what has been achieved in those years.”
ARCHIVE – UNRWA – EARLY 1950s, LOCATION UNKNOWN
19. Various shots, UNRWA schools in the open and in tents
20. Med shot, doctor vaccinating Palestine refugee
ARCHIVE – UNRWA – JUNE 1967
21. Various shots, refugees crossing the River Jordan
ARCHIVE – UNRWA – 1967, EAST BANK, JORDAN
22. Various shots, refugee tent camps
FILE – UNRWA – MARCH 2008, NAHR EL BARED, LEBANON
23. Various shots, destruction in Nahr el Bared
24. Wide shot, children by fire in ruins
25. Wide shot, two boys moving oven in rubble
26. Med shot, girl running in street
FILE – UNRWA – OCTOBER 2007, NAHR EL BARED, LEBANON
27. Wide shot, demolished UNRWA school
28. Med shot, demolished desks and classroom of UNRWA school
FILE – UNRWA – MARCH 2008, NAHR EL BARED, LEBANON
29. Various shots, new school outside Nahr el Bared camp, kids in class
UNTV - 18 SEPTEMBER 2009, NEW YORK CITY
30. SOUNDBITE (English) Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA):
“We keep going round and coming back again to where we started, some years ago or some months ago. And some of the things we see being brought up right now as the solutions are certainly the solutions that were brought up earlier over the past years that I’ve been there, even as early as Camp David and Taba and the Geneva initiative, all of these things have elements in them that will have to be considered and discussed anyway; get round the table and talk please!”
FILE – UNRWA - MAY 2009, GAZA
31. Various shots, Gaza people and ruins
32. Various shots, men with sledgehammers in rubble
UNTV - 18 SEPTEMBER 2009, NEW YORK CITY
33. SOUNDBITE (English) Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA):
“There are signs out there. There’s also the worry on many people, and you hear it from the refugees, well I thought this would be solved in my lifetime, now I hope it will be solved in my children’s lifetime. So I think people are both realistic, sometimes optimistic and sometimes quite full of hopelessness and despair.”
FILE – UNRWA - 30 JULY 2009, GAZA
34. Various shots, successful attempt to break the world record in kite flying
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) will mark its 60th anniversary with a ministerial-level event at UN headquarters on Thursday (24 September), where governments will pay tribute to six decades of service to the world’s largest and longest standing refugee population.
The UN estimates that the 1948 Arab-Israeli war drove over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.
As a wave of destitute people flooded the Middle East – in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, the international community mandated UNRWA to provide aid to the growing refugee population living in camps across the region.
UNRWA’s assistance to Palestinian refugees has continued from 1949 to the present day.
In January, 22 days of intense fighting in Gaza forced thousand of civilians to flee their homes. More than 50 000 civilians fled to UNRWA facilities, mostly to schools that were turned into emergency shelters.
In spite of difficult conditions, UNRWA managed to maintain food distribution throughout the conflict and quickly resumed its normal services to the refugees when the fighting was over.
Just a week after the hostilities ended, UNRWA re-opened all 221 of its schools in Gaza and some 200 000 students returned. Teachers spent long hours listening to children recounting their experiences that no child should ever have to live through.
SOUNDBITE (English) Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA):
“We’re not celebrating as we say, you can’t celebrate sixty years of refugees, but to commemorate what has been achieved in those years.”
From the start, UNRWA committed itself to the education of the refugee children.
Even if the first schools were in tents and out in the open, UNRWA had taken the first steps in developing the human potential of the refugees.
By the late 60s literacy among the refugees was higher than among the population in some of the host countries.
The 1967 war caused a second exodus in which people that had been born and brought up in camps fled to the East Bank of the River Jordan, and remains one of the biggest challenges UNRWA has ever faced.
Severely under-funded then, the Agency coped with the situation by relying on remarkable commitment from Palestinian aid workers in desperate circumstances.
The Agency continued to face severe tests during the turbulent decades that followed. In 2007 the Nahr el Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon was reduced to rubble in fierce fighting between the Lebanese army and the radical group Fatah al Islam.
Today life is slowly returning. Rebuilding the camp is currently one of UNRWA’s most urgent priorities.
Asked at a recent press conference at UN headquarters about the future of the Palestinian refugees, UNRWA Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd said the issue would be need to be resolved as part of a peace process along with other final status issues, and urged all sides in the Middle East conflict to come together and talk.
SOUNDBITE (English) Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA):
“We keep going round and coming back again to where we started, some years ago or some months ago. And some of the things we see being brought up right now as the solutions are certainly the solutions that were brought up earlier over the past years that I’ve been there, even as early as Camp David and Taba and the Geneva initiative, all of these things have elements in them that will have to be considered and discussed anyway; get round the table and talk please!”
AbuZayd said that the mood among refugees and those working with them was more hopeful this year, because of the “stronger lead” taken by the US administration on the Middle East and other developments.
But she warned that a funding crisis was threatening the agency’s ability to pay the salaries of its 29,000 staff, and urged Member States to donate more generously. She said that both staff and refugees were “becoming restless” about the funding problem and contingency plans might have to be taken unless money is provided soon.
SOUNDBITE (English) Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA):
“There are signs out there. There’s also the worry on many people, and you hear it from the refugees, well I thought this would be solved in my lifetime, now I hope it will be solved in my children’s lifetime. So I think people are both realistic, sometimes optimistic and sometimes quite full of hopelessness and despair.”
Providing hope and inspiration for the next generation is as much part of UNRWA’s activities as relief and development assistance.
In July 2009, with help from UNRWA, 6,000 children went to the beach to break the world record for kite flying. Meticulous monitoring of the event confirmed that 3710 kites were in the air simultaneously for the required 30 seconds, and the children of Gaza children became the official holders of a Guinness world record.
UNRWA’s 60th anniversary is being commemorated with a week-long series of events in New York this week, including the unveiling of a commemorative banner that will adorn the façade of the iconic UN General Assembly building by the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Deputy Secretary General, Asha-Rose Migiro; and academic conferences at Columbia University and the Princeton Club on UNRWA’s humanitarian role in current peace efforts and its contribution to human capital in the Middle East.
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