Youths leaving Gaza to work in Libya

PalPress reports that many Gaza youth are leaving their homes to help build up Libya.

For $900, Gazans can get the proper permits to enter Libya to work. Most of the work needed is physical labor, mostly in construction - no university degrees needed.

Young men in Gaza, disillusioned at the high rate of unemployment, are happily shelling out the $900 to be able to get out of Gaza.

Palestinian Arab officials are concerned at the drain in resources, worried that they might never come back. One official, Abu Iyad Misbah, was quoted as saying "Youth is the mainstay of society, but what is happening in Palestine is to the contrary: everyone wants to migrate from his homeland to live in the homelands of others."

The article goes on to say that nothing is being done to keep the youth in Gaza.

It should be noted that in the 1950s a significant number of Palestinian Arab males went to work in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq and also Libya to get jobs and get away from the UNRWA-run camps. Many of their descendants are still in Gulf countries, although the Palestinian Arabs were expelled from Kuwait before the first Gulf War and most of those in Iraq were chased out during the second. Qaddafi expelled most of the Libyan Palestinians as well for political reasons in the 1990s.