Washington,
\nThe leaders of 21 humanitarian aid groups wrote to the Trump administration on Wednesday to object \u201cin the strongest terms\u201d to a decision to withhold $65 million in planned US contributions to the United Nations agency that serves Palestinian refugees.<\/p>\n
The US State Department said last week that Washington would withhold $65 million it had planned to pay the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), saying it needed to make unspecified reforms.<\/p>\n
The leaders of the aid groups warned of \u201cdire consequences\u201d if the cut was maintained, according to the letter, a copy of which was given to Reuters.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are deeply concerned by the humanitarian consequences of this decision on life-sustaining assistance to children, women and men in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip,\u201d the letter said.<\/p>\n
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert on Thursday denied the move was to punish Palestinians, who have been sharply critical of President Donald Trump\u2019s announcement last month that he would move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n
She repeated the US view that UNRWA needs reform, saying there are a lot more refugees in the program than previously, and that \u201cmoney coming in from other countries needs to increase as well to continue paying for all those refugees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International and former US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, said the comments by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, was aimed at punishing Palestinian political leaders and forcing them to make political concessions.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it is wrong to punish political leaders by denying life-sustaining aid to civilians. This is a dangerous and striking departure from US policy on international humanitarian assistance which conflicts starkly with values that US administrations and the American people have embraced,\u201d Schwartz said in the letter.<\/p>\n
The State Department also said on Thursday that the United States would not provide a separate $45 million in food aid for Palestinians that it pledged last month as part of the West Bank\/Gaza Emergency Appeal led by UNRWA.<\/p>\n
Nauert said the United States had made clear to UNRWA that the $45 million was a pledge aimed at helping the agency with \u201cforecasting,\u201d but it was not a guarantee.<\/p>\n
Trump said in a Twitter post on January 2 that the United States gives the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars a year, \u201cbut get no appreciation or respect.\u201d The decisions to curb funding are likely to compound the difficulty of reviving Israeli-Palestinian peace talks as well as further undermine Arabs\u2019 faith that the United States can act as an impartial arbitrator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington, The leaders of 21 humanitarian aid groups wrote to the Trump administration on Wednesday to object \u201cin the strongest terms\u201d to a decision to withhold $65 million in planned US contributions to the United Nations agency that serves Palestinian refugees. The US State Department said last week that Washington would withhold $65 million it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19767,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19768,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19766\/revisions\/19768"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}