UN secures $100m for Palestine
ROME: The United Nations received pledges Thursday of nearly $100 million in new funding for the UN relief agency for Palestinians after the US slashed its aid, but it is still facing a nearly $350-million shortfall this year.
A dozen countries announced new funding during an emergency donor conference called as the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) experiences the worst funding crisis in its 68-year history. Stepping up were Qatar, Canada, Switzerland, Turkey, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Mexico, Slovakia, India and France, UN officials said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “an important first step was reached” with the new pledges. But he said “a long way is in front of us” to fully fund the agency, which went into the conference facing a $446-million gap in financing this year after the US, which has provided a third of the agency’s budget, announced it was withholding aid.
“If UNRWA would not exist, if these services were not provided, the security of region would be severely undermined,” Mr Guterres told reporters. “Now it is very clear ... that the extraordinary unanimity in political support to UNRWA and its activities translates itself into cash.”
The agency, the oldest and largest UN relief program in the Middle East, provides health care, education and social services to an estimated 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948.
Mr Guterres told the conference that cutting sanitation, health care and medical services in already poverty-wracked and conflict-ridden areas “would have severe impact — a cascade of problems that could push the suffering in disastrous and unpredictable directions.”
The Trump administration announced in January it was withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding installment. It made clear that additional US donations would be contingent on major reforms at the agency.