FOREIGN POLICY/PALESTINE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/UN: “In the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, Mahmoud Ferwana, 59, huddled beneath a flimsy nylon-and-sheet-metal roof while rain drenched the rest of his squalid home’s sandy floor. He earns money collecting broken stones; his children scavenge for copper. But none of it amounts to a living.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency is what reliably puts food in their mouths… That aid, to Mr. Ferwana and more than five million other Palestinians living in refugee camps across the Middle East, is now endangered by what the agency’s leaders are calling the worst financial crisis in its seven-decade history.
The United States, its biggest donor, announced this week that it was withholding $65 million from a scheduled payment of $120 million. The Trump administration said it was pressing for unspecified reforms from the agency, while also seeking to get Arab countries to contribute more. In response, the relief agency said on Wednesday that it would begin a fund-raising campaign to try to close the gap before it is forced to cut vital safety-net services…
The Trump administration’s move, which added to a deficit of around $150 million on the agency’s budget of nearly $1.25 billion, brought new attention to a sprawling agency that functions as a quasi-government in some areas of the Middle East and has courted controversy throughout most of its history. And it revived politically loaded questions about just who should qualify as refugees — and what is the proper role of the organization charged with caring for them.”
-David M Halbfinger, “U.S. Funding Cut Reignites Debate on Palestinian Refugee Agency,” The New York Times online, Jan. 17, 2018