Jack Saadeh, head of Pal-Mark, one of the major hotel and restaurant suppliers in the West Bank, opened a cosmopolitan new café, Jasmine, in the Al-Tira section of Ramallah. Since May, the café has been bustling. Pal-Mark increased its profits by about 25 percent in 2010, said Saadeh, attributing the growth to Fayyad’s government.
He, however, faces the most difficulty distributing goods internally within the West Bank. “The checkpoints and access roads we must use to bypass settlements slow down the process,” Saadeh told IRIN, and “prices of basic commodities are inflated by the flat sales tax set by Israel.”
In this report:
The Palestinian economy is growing but remains unsustainable, with large sections of the population still unemployed and trapped by rising poverty, says a new report by the International Monetary Fund...Still, the IMF is upbeat. “The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is now able to conduct sound economic policies expected of a future Palestinian state,” it said.
What checkpoints?
There are hardly none left.
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