MOFCOM provides $8.32 million grant for Ramallah Ring Road Project

In April 2017, the Chinese Government and Ramallah Municipality, represented by its Director General, Ahmed Abu Laban, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) regarding an $8.32 million grant for the Ramallah Ring Road Project. China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) is the source of funding. The Mayor of Ramallah, Musa Hadid, and the Chinese Ambassador to the State of Palestine, Chen Xingzhong, signed the MOU at the headquarters of the Ramallah Municipal House. Under the terms of the MOU, the Chinese Government agreed to allocate $7.7 million for the physical construction of the road. The purpose of the project is to construct 9 municipal roads (measuring somewhere between 7.5 km and 8.2 km in length) that will connect the Al-Jadwal neighborhood (district) to several of the main roads in Ramallah City. A project implementation agreement was signed on November 26, 2018 and the project officially broke ground on December 20, 2018. The originally expected duration of project implementation was 14 months and project completion was expected to occur in February 2020. However, as of March 2021, AidData could not identify any evidence that this project had reached completion. As of December 20, 2018 (the date of the groundbreaking ceremony), the Israeli authorities had still not granted the Palestinian side permission to build this road since it was partially located in places classified as ‘Area C’, which is under full Israeli control (under the terms of the Oslo Accord signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel in 1993). Also, it is known that a Chinese firm (Third Railway Survey and Design Institute Group Co., Ltd.) is supporting this project, but the exact nature of its involvement is unknown.

Additional details

The Chinese project title is 拉姆安拉市政连接道路项目 or 中国政府援助巴勒斯坦拉姆安拉市连接道路项目 or 巴勒斯坦拉姆安拉市连接道路项目. Ramallah City is 19 square km in area and home to a population of almost 70,000. It is considered the political and economic hub of the Palestinian Authority and economy.

Number of official sources

7

Number of total sources

18