Gov’t: 75% of Gaza Evacuees Have Jobs, By Tovah Lazaroff (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts;
Approximately 75 percent of the Gaza Strip evacuees have found jobs since they were expelled from their homes in 2005, according to statistics presented Monday to the Ministerial Disengagement Committee. This number will increase to 85% within half a year, government officials who are working with the evacuees said.
But Yosef Zvi Rimon, head of the nongovernmental group JobKatif, which helps to find jobs for the evacuees, said the government’s numbers were too high. He said only 38% of the evacuees had found jobs.
Rimon said 2,100 of the Gaza residents had jobs before implementation of the disengagement plan, but only 800 had found jobs since. He attributed the discrepancy between his numbers and the government’s to the method for calculating how many Gaza evacuees were employable.
Rimon said all the jobs the evacuees lost needed to be replaced. The government, he said, counted only those evacuees it believed could be employed. As a result, the government was not taking into account those over the age of 50 who were having a hard time finding work.
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