UN: Money or not, world can’t drop Palestinian refugees
UNITED NATIONS — Facing a financial crisis after the United States cut funding, the head of the U.N. agency that helps 5.3 million Palestinian refugees says the problem of their well-being will continue to exist whether there’s money or not — and especially if it was forced to shut down.
While the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, got some good news Wednesday with new pledges of $118 million, it remains $68 million in the hole this year. And in January it will face the problem of trying to find funding for next year’s budget of about $1.2 billion.
“Of course, we worry about it,” UNRWA Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl said. “The key question for next year will be whether these countries that have shown themselves so generous in supporting us this year ... are they prepared to sustain those contributions?”
As Krahenbuhl sat down for an interview with The Associated Press about the agency’s future on Thursday, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told the U.N. General Assembly that UNRWA is critical to millions of his people but U.S. officials “just want to obliterate it altogether.”
UNRWA was established after the war surrounding Israel’s establishment in 1948 to aid the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes. Today, it provides education, health care and social services to 5.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Krahenbuhl said the sudden U.S. funding cut of $300 million early this year and the Aug. 31 announcement by the Trump administration that it was ending decades of funding for UNRWA were “a matter of deep regret and sincere disappointment” since the U.S. was historically the agency’s largest donor, paying nearly 30 percent of its budget.
“But it’s a disappointment also because the decision was taken for political reasons,” he said. “It’s not in relation to our performance, and that makes it very difficult for a humanitarian organization because for political reasons we’re related and adjusted to the tensions between the U.S. and the Palestinian leadership.”
“It’s very important to protect humanitarian funding from these forms of politicization,” Krahenbuhl stressed.
In announcing the end to funding, the U.S. called UNRWA an “irredeemably flawed operation.” The Trump administration’s top Mideast adviser, Jared Kushner, went further in an internal email published by Foreign Policy magazine. He was quoted as calling for a “sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA” and saying the agency “perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.”