Poverty in Israeli-Occupied Territories Remains Worst in OECD

Date: 06 December 2017 - 22:45

News ID: ۴۷۱۹۶

WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Poverty has eased among the elderly and Arabs in the Israeli-occupied territories, reports the National Insurance Institute, but more accurate data about Bedouin has raised the number of poor.
A recalculation of poverty among the Bedouin population in occupied territories increased the number of children classified as poor by 10.2%, according to figures published by the National Insurance Institute in its report on poverty.
The report states that the Zionist regime still has the highest rate of poverty in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and that a family in occupied territories with three or more children will be below the poverty line if both parents are employed full-time at the minimum wage.
Minister of Labor, Welfare, and Social Services Haim Katz, said "We still have 1.8 million people that we have to get out of poverty. The two most prominent trends are a fall in the number of poor people who are senior citizens and in the Arab community."
According to the report, Israel had 1,809,000 poor people in 463,000 families in 2016, including 842,300 children. The number of poor children grew by almost 80,000, but the National Insurance Institute is attributing this to new figures obtained for the Bedouin population, after the Central Bureau of Statistics succeeded for the first time in five years in sampling the Bedouin population in southern parts of the occupied territories.
Excluding the Bedouin population, the number of poor children in occupied territories rose by only 1% to 773,000. The report’s figures ostensibly show that Bedouin children were not counted at all in 2015 among poor children in Israel.