Every day brings news of further tragedy from the Middle East: car bombs in crowded Iraqi marketplaces, political assassinations in Lebanon, bread riots in Egypt, Israeli F-16s mounting bombardments in Palestinian civilian neighbourhoods, rockets fired into Israel from Gaza, fighting between Palestinian factions.
But behind the headlines and the television images is another, equally disturbing reality.
It’s a story we seldom hear: a story of ordinary people struggling to live ordinary lives against a backdrop of increasing poverty and insecurity, displacement, unemployment and the collapse of public services.
‘Conflict affects everything Christian Aid does in this region’
As the stories on this website show, daily survival is a struggle. In Iraq, 4.2 million people have been forced to leave their homes due to the prevalent violence, while only 32% of the population have access to clean drinking water. In Hebron’s Old City, settlers have seized Palestinian shops and homes.
Across the West Bank, farmers are losing the farms they’ve tilled for decades or centuries through land confiscation for settlement expansion. The Israeli blockade of Gaza means that movement in and out of Gaza is all but impossible, and supplies of food and water, sewage treatment and basic healthcare can no longer be guaranteed – 80% of the population is now reliant on humanitarian aid.
In Egypt, the recent food crisis has sparked disturbances in a population dissatisfied with human rights abuses, especially the rights to freedom of expression and clamping down on rights of association and collective bargaining.
Humanitarian crisis
For ordinary people across the Middle East the humanitarian crisis is just as fundamental to the conflicts in which they live as the F-16s and suicide bombers that make the news.
Christian Aid has more than 50 years of experience working in the Middle East. Conflict affects everything we do in this region, as without peace, there can be no equality, justice or prosperity.
Our mission is to eradicate poverty, and that means speaking out to challenge and change the systems that keep people poor – including violence and war.
Read more about our work in Iraq and the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.