URGENT PLEA FOR AID FOR ARAB REFUGEES

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 August 1948, Page 5

URGENT PLEA FOR AID FOR ARAB REFUGEES

(Recd. 2 p.m.) LONDON, Aug. 17. The executive committee of the International Children's Emergency Fund has complied with Count Bernadotte’s request and approved of a £ 125,000 relief programme lor mothers and children fleeing from the Palestine combat areas.

Reporting this, the Associated Press Geneva correspondent adds that it is believed that children and nursing and pregnant women comprise over threequarters of the estimated 330.000 refugees, mostly Arabs, who lied from Palestine. The fund will send to the Middle East in the next two months special supplies of meat, milk powder, margarine, fruit, cheese and fish. _ Count Bernadotte, in an urgent cablegram to the United States Secretary of State, General Marshall, warned that the fate of the Arab and Jewish refugees threatened a “sudden human disaster, comparable to an earthquake or a tidal wave." Count Bernadotte appealed for emergency supplies and declared that successful mediation depended on a solution of the refugee problem. “The essential factor is time,” he said. “Refugees are being swept by epidemic diseases. Winter is approaching and many must die.” He asked for 2500 tons of wheat, 100 tons of tinned meat, 50 tons of cheese, 50 tons of butter and 20 tons of D.D.T. The State Department later announced that the “matter is receiving urgent consideration.”