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Mail delivery in Jerusalem suspended for two weeks

February 11, 2015 at 11:00 am

The main post office in occupied East Jerusalem has not delivered mail for two weeks, Haaretz has reported. Those affected include residents who have been expecting travel documents, bank transfers, cheques and bills but have received nothing. No reason has been given to them by the postal authorities for the disruption to deliveries, they said.

An official at the postal service told Haaretz that it has not suspended the delivery of mail but a backlog has piled up due to a manpower shortage in the main sorting office.

Many Jerusalem residents who have problems with the failure to deliver mail to homes have rented private boxes in the large post office located in Salah Al-Din Street. However, mail has not even been delivered to the private boxes there.

Khaled Abu Odeh, who works for a marketing company, told Haaretz that in the first week that mail was not delivered he checked his post office box daily and found it empty. At first, he thought that it was just one of those things, then he started to suspect that his mail was being stolen. Finally, he realised that all of the other boxes were also empty for the same length of time.

Odeh’s post box serves his whole family, which is not unusual; mail boxes often serve several branches of large families. “An estimated 200,000 Palestinian residents of the city depend on the post box service,” Haaretz pointed out.