The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) will demand $500 million from the international donors next week to be able to meet its financial needs, a senior PNA official has said.
According to Mohamed Abu Ramadan, the PNA minister for planning and administrative development, a meeting of the donor countries is to be held in New York next Wednesday.
He said the international meet was first of its kind since peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were resumed, Xinhua reported Thursday.
"Besides asking the donors to devote a financial aid to help end the shortage in our budget" Ramadan said, "the Palestinian side is to ask the meeting to put pressure on Israel to stop all its steps that obstruct the growth of the Palestinian economy".
The development of the Palestinian economy, he said, was basically linked to stopping all the Israeli restrictions imposed on the Palestinian commercial crossings and the free movement of goods in-and-out of the Palestinian territories.