US Cuts Over $200 Million in Aid to Palestinians

The United States has cut more than $200 million in economic aid to Palestinians, in a move that comes months after also drastically cutting its contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees.

A senior US official said on Friday that President Donald Trump had ordered the State Department to “redirect” the funding for programs in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip to unspecified “high-priority projects elsewhere,” Al Jazeera reported.

The Palestine Liberation Organization quickly denounced the US move, calling it “the use of cheap blackmail as a political tool. The Palestinian people and leadership will not be intimidated and will not succumb to coercion.”

“The rights of the Palestinian people are not for sale,” PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi said in a statement.

“There is no glory in constantly bullying and punishing a people under occupation. The US administration has already demonstrated meanness of spirit in its collusion with the Israeli occupation and its theft of land and resources; now it is exercising economic meanness by punishing the Palestinian victims of this occupation.”

The decision to cut Palestinian funding comes amid a severe humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, where more than 160 Palestinians protesting for their right to return to the areas from which they were forcibly expelled from in 1948 have been killed by Israeli gunfire since March 30 during weeks-long demonstrations near the fence with Israel.

Officials in the Gaza Strip, which has been administered by Hamas since 2007, have previously blasted the US for its support of Israel, saying that Washington has long lost its regional credibility.

The US had planned to give the Palestinians $251 million for good governance, health, education and funding for civil society in the current 2018 budget year that ends on September 30.

In a controversial and sharply criticized move in January, the US government announced that it was withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding installment to the UNRWA, which provides services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon.