Media coverage
Al Jazeera Arabic · 2010-08-12
The Gaza Strip saw the opening of several seaside tourist resorts and investment projects this year, amid the Israeli blockade, as private and local actors viewed them as outlets for residents and opportunities to develop local investments and create jobs. The report highlights examples such as Crazy Water Park and Al Bustan Resort, noting their facilities and the debate over prices being high relative to most citizens’ incomes. Economist Omar Shaban says such projects could help stimulate economic development, but their success can only be judged over time and with attention to avoiding duplication and haphazard distribution.
The Gaza Strip saw the opening of several seaside tourist resorts and investment projects this year, amid the Israeli blockade, as private and local actors viewed them as outlets for residents and opportunities to develop local investments and create jobs. The report highlights examples such as Cra…
This year, the Gaza Strip witnessed the opening of a number of tourist resorts and investment projects on the seashore, belonging to private entities and local institutions, which saw in them a development of their lost investments as a result of the Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip for the past four years.
“Crazy Water Park” is considered one of the largest tourist resorts. It was opened by a group of Gazan investors in mid-June, in the Sheikh Ajleen area near the Gaza seashore. Its director refused to disclose its cost, but it appears high relative to the scale of the facilities visible on the site.
According to the resort’s general manager, Hani Abdel Bari, its opening came with the aim of easing the burdens of citizens pent up as a result of the blockade and the closure of the crossings, and of creating places for recreation and entertainment that the Strip lacks.
The resort, established on an area of 15,000 square meters, includes an Olympic-standard swimming pool, a 250-meter artificial watercourse, children’s amusement games, three water-sliding towers, in addition to two restaurants.
The number of visitors to the resort reaches around one thousand per day, and the entrance ticket costs two and a half dollars.
Some believe that the patrons of tourist resorts are limited to the affluent strata and those with high incomes, and that most citizens are therefore deprived of enjoying them because of their high cost compared to their low incomes.
Citizen Mohammed Abu Hashish, 27, who works as an employee at one of the companies, said: “The presence of more than one tourist venue in Gaza has created an atmosphere of competition among resort owners to provide the best services at the lowest prices.”
He added to Al Jazeera Net, while strolling with his family inside the Crazy Water resort: All services are available and excellent, and the place is distinguished by calm, cleanliness, and beauty, but the prices are high and do not suit the means of the ordinary citizen.
Facilitation
For his part, the director of the Tourism Department in the dismissed government, Rizq al-Hilu, explained that his department provides all the necessary services and facilities to investors in order to establish investment projects, especially those related to the field of domestic tourism, stemming from his directorate’s concern with confronting the blockade and closure suffered by Gaza’s residents.
Al-Hilu told Al Jazeera Net that the Gaza Strip has witnessed a major boom in tourism establishments, especially after the Israeli war on Gaza, as it now has approximately eighty restaurants, seven tourist resorts, four amusement parks, in addition to 13 tourist hotels.
Among the features that distinguish al-Bustan Resort, which belongs to the Islamic Society close to Hamas and is established on an area of 15 dunams on the Sudania seashore north of Gaza, is its shift from consumer-oriented work to charitable investment work, with its revenue going into a fund designated for orphans.
The resort, whose cost exceeded eight hundred thousand dollars, contains a restaurant, a corniche, tents and gardens, a fish farm, a semi-Olympic-standard swimming pool with capacity for more than seventy people, and children’s games. It also includes a prayer area and an artificial sea tongue.
The number of visitors to the resort is estimated at one thousand people on ordinary days, and two thousand people on weekends.
Like the other resorts, al-Bustan Resort contributes to creating job opportunities for youth, as sixty workers and administrators are employed there, and it produces more than fifty tons of fish annually.
Driving development
Economic expert Omar Shaban believes that establishing investment projects in the Strip would help drive the wheel of economic development, which has been stalled for years, and create new job opportunities for thousands of unemployed people.
Regarding the evaluation of the investment projects existing in Gaza, he indicated that judging their success will only be possible after years have passed, because there are seasonal projects that quickly disappear after a short time.
Shaban told Al Jazeera Net that Gaza needs tourist resorts, provided that their distribution across different areas is taken into account and that they avoid repetition and randomness.
Text © Al Jazeera Arabic — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source