Warnings over ‘devastating’ US decision to freeze Palestinian refugee funding

A Palestinian man carries a sacs of food aid provided by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNWRA, at the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees faces its worst funding crisis ever. (AFP)

LONDON: The Arab League and aid agencies on Wednesday warned of the devastating consequences of a US decision to freeze $65 million of Palestinian refugee funding.
The outcry came as the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas again blasted Donald Trump’s “sinful” decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Washington said on Tuesday it would provide $60 million to the UN Relief and Welfare Agency but would hold back a further $65 million. The US State Department said UNRWA needed to make unspecified reforms.
Both the head of the Arab League and the chief of the UN agency warned that holding back the money would exacerbate hardship, and effect education and health for some of the region’s most vulnerable people.
More than half a million boys and girls in 700 UNRWA schools could be affected by the fund cut, as well as Palestinian access to primary health care.
The cut in funding will effect Gaza in particular, where UNRWA helps much of its population of 2 million.
UNRWA’s Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl said he would appeal to other donor nations for money and launch "a global fundraising campaign" aimed at keeping the agency's schools and clinics for refugees open through 2018 and beyond.
"At stake is the dignity and human security of millions of Palestine refugees, in need of emergency food assistance and other support in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip," Krähenbühl said.
He also warned that the move risks further instability in the region by contributing to the conditions that feed extremist ideologies.
In a Twitter post earlier this month, Trump said that Washington gives the Palestinians "HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect.”
Trump added that "with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?"
The US State Department said Washington had been UNRWA’s single largest donor for decades and insisted the decision to freeze the funding was taken to encourage other countries to help pay for and reform the agency.
Some US official had wanted to cut all aid to Palestinians while others were concerned about the humanitarian and diplomatic fallout.
Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit said halting the money was aimed at wiping out the whole Palestinian refugee issue.
"This decision affects the education and health of Palestinians and aims to eradicate the question of refugees," he said.
Hanan Ashrawi, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization said the White House was "targeting the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people".
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has called for a gradual cut in UNRWA funding and transferring its responsibilities to the UN global refugee agency, said he supported the move.
The freeze comes aid outrage among Palestinians over Trump’s decisions to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Palestinians want the city to be the capital of their future state and east Jerusalem has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.
"Jerusalem will be a gate for peace only if it is Palestine's capital, and it will be a gate of war, fear and the absence of security and stability, God forbid, if it is not," a furious Mahmoud Abbas said at a conference in Cairo on Wednesday.
The Palestinian president, who initially described the decision as a "slap of the century," said the US has disqualified itself from continuing as a broker in any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Netanyahu threw fuel on the fire on Wednesday by saying he was certain the US Embassy in Israel would be moved to Jerusalem sometime this year.
Moving the embassy was a key Trump foreign policy election pledge but US officials have said it is unlikely it would move from Tel Aviv before the end of the end his term in office.
The Cairo conference was organized by Al-Azhar, the primary seat of learning for the world's Sunni Muslims.
Earlier, Al-Azhar's grand imam and Egypt's top Muslim cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, described Trump's Jerusalem decision as “unjust”. He said it must be countered by a revival of awareness of the Palestinian question.
— With AP, AFP and Reuters