Qatar commits $60m for gas pipeline from Israel to Gaza Strip

The Government of Qatar has said that it will offer $60m to build a natural gas pipeline from Israel into the Gaza Strip.

The pipeline project is expected to ease the energy crisis in Gaza Strip by providing higher electrical capacity. It would also help achieve regularity of the current in the Gaza Strip.

The financial assistance was announced by Qatar’s Gaza Reconstruction Committee Ambassador chairman Mohammed Al Emadi during a meeting held with the Prime Minister of Palestine Dr Mohammad Shtayyeh and the representative of the European Union to Palestine Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff.

Al Emadi said that the amount will be used for extending gas pipelines from the Israeli side while the EU’s €20m aid will be used to complete the pipeline project’s extensions inside the Gaza Strip.

Planned to be completed in 2023, the project will deliver natural gas from the Chevron-operated deepwater Leviathan field in the eastern Mediterranean into Israel via an existing pipeline into Israel, and then into Gaza through a proposed new extension, according to Reuters.

The gas will be supplied to the only power plant in the Gaza Strip.

In a separate announcement, Uganda said it is set to commence construction of the $3.5bn oil pipeline, which will begin in Hoima in western Uganda and end at the Indian Ocean seaport town of Tanga in Tanzania.

An agreement was signed last year between Tanzania and Uganda allowing for the construction of a 1,445km crude oil export pipeline. It is planned to be built with France’s Total.

In 2006, Uganda made crude reserves discovery in the Albertine rift basin in the west of the country near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Reuters reported.

As per the government geologists estimate, the discovery holds overall reserves of six billion barrels.