GAZA CITY (RTV/NBCNC) – Palestinian refugees at a camp in Gaza City are angry after learning the U.S. will be halting funding to the U.N. agency that sustains them.
In the oldest refugee camp established by the United Nations relief and works office, Palestinian refugees stand in line at a distribution center.
On Sunday, they were waiting to get food coupons, only two days after the U.S. said it was cutting off money for the program.
Palestinian refugees at the al-Shati Refugee Camp have for years relied on these coupons to feed their families and are worried what could happen to them because of the cuts.
U.N.R.W.A. provides services to about five-million Palestinian refugees across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank and Gaza.
Most are descendants of the roughly 700,000 Palestinians who were driven out of their homes or fled the fighting in the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation.
The U.S. announcement Friday said it will no longer support the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestine refugees (U.N.R.W.A.) It’s a move that deepens the cash crisis at the agency and escalates tensions with the Palestinian leadership.
The agency will now ask existing donors for more money and seek new sources of income.
The U.S., by far U.N.R.W.A.’s biggest donor, slashed funding earlier this year, paying out only $60 million of a first installment in January, and withholding $65 million. It had promised $365 million for the whole year.
Washington said the agency needed to make unspecified reforms and called on the Palestinians to renew peace talks with Israel.
The last Palestinian-Israeli peace talks collapsed in 2014, partly because of Israel’s opposition to an attempted unity pact between the Fatah and Hamas Palestinian factions and to Israeli settlement building on occupied land that Palestinians seek for a state.
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