GAZA, PALESTINE — Israeli company SodaStream announced today it will open a new factory in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The announcement comes on the heels of a statement from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announcing it would cut food and general relief to Gaza, at a time when Palestinians living under an illegal blockade need it most.
In a statement on Wednesday, the WFP announced it would slash humanitarian relief to suffering Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as well as the occupied West Bank territories next year, blaming Washington’s own cuts to their organization.
According to the WFP, the budget cuts suggest that upwards of 166,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip will suffer a 20 percent reduction in food aid overall.
According to the World Food Programme’s own statistics, nearly a quarter of Gaza’s population, or 1.3 million people, lack access to nutritious food.
These agreements put Israeli institutions in charge of 71 percent of Palestinian water.
However, the Israelis also have a history of arbitrarily turning off Gaza’s water supplies.
SodaStream to mooch scarce Gaza water?
This SodaStream factory was located in one of the largest illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, on the ruins of seven Palestinian villages whose inhabitants were forced out to make way for a Jewish-only town, in contravention of international law and decades of stated U.S. policy.” The BDS movement claims SodaStream is still subject to boycott, despite moving its factory, owing to the company’s complicity in Israel’s general policy of forcibly removing indigenous Palestinians from their homes.
Top Photo | A Palestinian girl holds plastic bottles waiting to fill them with drinking water at a public tap in town of Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip, July 27, 2014.