Unpaid hospital cleaning workers strike in Gaza

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Cleaning workers at hospitals in the Gaza Strip declared a 24-hour strike on Wednesday in protest of not being paid their salaries, a union official said.

Sami al-Amsi, president of the Federation of Palestine trade union, told Ma'an that the cleaning workers had not been paid their meager monthly salaries of around $200 for the past five months.

"Today we are staging a 24-hour strike, and we will give them the opportunity to meet our demands because we are not interested in aggravating the crisis in Gaza hospitals which already suffer from shortage in medicines and power supply," al-Amsi said.

Some 750 cleaning workers are participating in the strike, he said.

He said the union had contacted both Gaza's health ministry and the national consensus government to inquire about the salaries, but did not receive a response from either. more

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