Growth in the West bank and Gaza must be focused on jobs, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday, at the start of a conference on the Trump administration's $50 billion economic plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Business leaders and politicians have gathered in Bahrain to discuss the plan that Washington says is vital to ending the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but which Palestinian leaders have dismissed as pointless without a political solution.
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"One of the really good aspects of the plan ... is that it identifies some of the sectors, some of the industrial and economic sectors, that will be conducive to jobs," IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said during the opening session.
"It cannot be any kind of growth in the West Bank and Gaza, it needs to be job intensive," she added, listing agriculture, tourism and construction as sectors that "will absorb a lot of labor."
The IMF expects the Palestinian economy to contract by 1.6% this year and says unemployment stands at 30% in the West Bank and 50% in Gaza.
"There is an economic plan, there is urgency: it is a question of making sure that the momentum is sustained," Lagarde said.
The IMF has been operating in the West Bank and Gaza since 1995, providing loans, credit guarantees, and policy advice to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
Saudi Arabia's minister of state said the US economic plan could succeed since it includes the private sector and if "there is hope of peace."
"I truly believe it can be done if people do believe that it can be done," Mohammed Al-Sheikh told the economic summit in Bahrain.
"And the way to make the people on the ground believe is give them hope that this will be sustainable, that this will be everlasting and that ultimately there will be prosperity and there will be sustained development," Al-Sheikh added.
