US to End All Funding to UN Agency That Helps Palestinian Refugees
(MEE) — The Trump administration will announce within weeks that it will halt all funding for the United Nations agency which provides humanitarian aid to more than five million Palestinian refugees, according to multiple reports this week.
As part of its decision, the US will also call for a sharp decrease in the number of Palestinians who are recognised as refugees, reducing the current five million figure to fewer than a tenth of that number, an official familiar with the decision told the Washington Post.
Reports of the policy decision come months after the US State Department announced in January it was cutting its funding for the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) by more than half, withholding $65m out of a previously earmarked $125m aid package.
The cuts have fueled despair and protests over recent months in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave besieged for 11 years, where 1.3 million people out of two million residents are refugees and 80 percent of the population is dependent on aid.
In July, after 125 local UNRWA staff members lost their jobs and 800 more had their contracts downgraded in the wake of the cuts, a Palestinian aid worker attempted to set himself on fire during a demonstration.
“UNRWA has thrown my family and I onto the street. The street will not be able to sustain us,” Nidal Wishah, the aid worker, wrote in a piece which explains why he had set himself on fire.
For nearly 70 years, the agency offered registered Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria access to education, healthcare and social services in addition to providing support to purchase food.
US President Donald Trump has argued that the US, which has been the largest donor to the agency for decades, is paying too much without getting “appreciation or respect”.
“With Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?” he tweeted in January.
Many Palestinians, however, say the US is cutting the aid to pressure various sides into going along with the Trump administration’s so-called “deal of the century” peace plan, and to strip the majority of Palestinians of their refugee status, erasing the issue of right of return altogether.
Earlier this week, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said: “We will be a donor if it (UNRWA) reforms what it does…if they actually change the number of refugees to accurate account, we will look back at partnering them.”
One former US Agency for International Development official told Foreign Policy, which first reported the story earlier this week, that the US decision to cut all funds was “dangerous”.
“An immediate and capricious cut off of UNRWA funding … risks collapsing the Palestinian Authority, empowering Hamas, and shifting the responsibility of health, education, and ultimately security services to the Israelis,” Dave Harden was quoted as saying.
“The decision is dangerous, with unpredictable consequences.”
In an opinion piece for MEE on Friday, journalist Ben White wrote that the halting of aid to UNRWA is only the latest in a series of US policy moves to “defeat the Palestinian struggle”.
“In the context of Israel’s ‘Jewish nation state’ law, the US recognition of Jerusalem, and moves towards annexation of West Bank territory,” White wrote, “those seeking the elimination of UNRWA envisage its demise to be a crucial part of the consolidation of an apartheid, single state, and the defeat of the Palestinian struggle.”
By MEE staff / Republished with permission / Middle East Eye / Report a typo
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