Rome: A US-induced half-billion-dollar funding shortfall for the UN relief agency for Palestinians risks cutting critical services that could “push the suffering in disastrous and unpredictable directions,” the UN chief warned Thursday.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressed an emergency funding conference in Rome after the US administration this year slashed tens of millions to the UN Relief and Works Agency, prompting the greatest funding crisis in its 68-year history.
The agency, the oldest and largest UN relief programme in the Middle East, provides health care, education and social services to an estimated 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Guterres told the conference, which was sponsored by Jordan, Egypt and Sweden, that investment in UN programmes addresses the despair and other factors “that lead to radicalisation” among young Palestinians.
Cutting sanitation, health care and medical services in already poverty-wracked and conflict-ridden areas “would have severe impacts - a cascade of problems that could push the suffering in disastrous and unpredictable directions,” he warned.
The Trump administration announced in January it was slashing $65 million this year.
But the agency said the actual cut was around $300 million because the US had led the agency to believe it would provide $365 million in 2018.
The US had been UNWRA’s largest donor, supplying nearly 30 per cent of its budget.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said the agency had already undertaken reform measures to streamline and rationalise its activities, but said “there is a limit to its ability to do so” given the enormous sustained needs faced by 5 million people.
“It is vital and it is necessary to address these very basic services, but also to provide dignity for multitudes of Palestinians and to (protect) many of them from the potential threats of radicalisation and terrorism,” he told reporters.
The agency head, Pierre Kraehenbuel, said expectations in the region were high that donors would step up and come to the agency’s rescue.
“The message to the Palestinian refugees has to be that they are not forgotten. All eyes in the refugee camps throughout the Middle East are on this conference,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948.
Today, there are an estimated 5 million refugees and their descendants, mostly scattered across the region.
