The European Union moved Monday to bolster the Palestinian emergency government, offering political and financial aid and urging Israel to follow suit. At a meeting in Luxembourg, EU foreign ministers were to review ways to directly fund PM Salam Fayyad and get aid to people in the Gaza Strip, which was seized by Hamas fighters late last week.
"There will be a direct relationship, economically also with the government," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told reporters as he arrived for the talks. "There will be a part of the money that will be direct."
Solana said that it was important to support Fayyad. "It's very important that he's able to construct a budget with which he's able to help both" the West Bank and Gaza, where poverty and insecurity has been rife over the last year, Solana said, according to AFP. "Whenever he does something to help he will do it in both places," he said. "This is very, very important."
EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner warned that European funds could not start flowing immediately because the new government would be hard pressed to effectively control and use the aid. "It is a matter of financial control and transparency and an emergency government at that moment, I cannot imagine that already there are all the structures," she said.
But Solana said the EU would be able to inject money through a special account that was set up with Fayyad when he was finance minister in the previous Hamas-led cabinet. Gaza, he said, would pose a special problem.
"In order to help the Palestinian people in Gaza we would need some mechanism that would not be direct support," he said.
"We are thinking about the possibility to do it through the agencies of the United Nations or maybe also to use the mechanism that we have in place."
