UNRWA Chief Says US Aid Cut Risks More Mideast Instability

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 23 (APP)::The United States’ move to cut funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for Palestinian refugees, is “abrupt and harmful” and risked destabilizing the Middle East, the agency’s chief has said.
“The reduction is a very severe one, it is abrupt and is harmful,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl, said in Gaza where he launched a global funding appeal to keep UNRWA’s schools and clinics open through 2018 and beyond.
“The world has to ask itself this question: does the Middle East need more instability? Is it reasonable to think that by reducing amounts to UNRWA one is achieving anything else but greater instability in the region?”
The United States, by far the largest contributor to UNRWA, announced on Jan. 16 that Washington will withhold $65 million of $125 million that it had planned to send to UNRWA this year.
UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions from U.N. member states.
U.S. President Donald Trump questioned the value of such funding, and the State Department said the agency needed to make unspecified reforms. More than half of the two million people in Gaza are dependent on support from UNRWA and other humanitarian agencies.
Palestinians say the funding decision could deepen hardship in the Gaza Strip, where the unemployment rate is 46 percent.
UNRWA was established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1949 after hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in the 1948 war that followed Israel’s creation.
Around 525,000 boys and girls in 700 UNRWA schools could be affected by the U.S. fund cut, Krahenbuhl said by video link to UN press corps in New York from Amman..
The United States’ gave $355 million to UNRWA in the 2017 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, U.S. officials say.
In a Twitter post on Jan. 2, Trump said that the U.S. 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?”