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IPFS News Link • Palestine -- Israel

US Funding Cut for UNRWA Illuminates Trump's 'Deal of the Century'

• https://libertarianinstitute.org By Jeremy R. Hamm

On August 31, the US government let the world know that it would not be releasing $60 million pledged to fund the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is mandated to provide development and humanitarian services to Palestinian refugees, and that no further funding for the agency would be forthcoming unless it changes its definition of "refugee" to reduce their numbers by a target of 90 percent.

Days earlier, on August 24, the US had announced that it would not provide $200 million in aid that Congress had allotted this year for humanitarian and economic projects in the Israel-occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

That announcement had come just days after US President Donald Trump had said that the Palestinians would "get something very good" since it was their "turn to get something" after he had shifted decades of US policy by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the State Department's Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.


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