US President Donald Trump decided to completely end all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) Washington Post revealed on Friday.
US senior administration officials told the Washington Post that a formal announcement is expected in the next few weeks.
According to the report Trump is planning to drastically reduce the number of Palestinian refugees accepted by the United States in parallel to withdrawing funding which previously accounted for around a third of UNRWA’s total budget of 1.1 billion dollars.
Nikki Haley the U.S. ambassador to the UN has said that Washington would only offer assistance to Palestinians again when they become less critical of the United States.
Maas warned that a collapse of UNRWA could provoke an “uncontrollable chain reaction” which would threaten peace in the Near and Middle East.
Dave Harden a former U.S. Agency for International Development official said “an immediate and capricious cut off of UNRWA funding risks collapsing the Palestinian Authority and shifting the responsibility of health education and ultimately security services to the Israelis.”
Harden added that the US administration’s decision is “dangerous with unpredictable consequences.”
UNRWA was founded in 1949 and supports more than five million Palestinians living in the autonomous areas of the West Bank and Gaza as well as in refugee camps in Syria Jordan and Lebanon.
The agency is considered a key factor to ensure stability in the Gaza strip in particular where 1.85 million Palestinians live in an extremely densely-populated area of only 365 sq km which is cordoned off by the Israeli army.
