The UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians is running out of cash
YOU may think that after a dozen years of blockade by Israel, three devastating wars and the rule of a harsh Islamist government, life in Gaza could hardly get worse. But the prospect of another war and a dire shortage of cash to pay for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, better known as UNRWA, mean that it can. Last year President Donald Trump’s administration said it would withhold $305m of the $365m that has annually serviced the agency, which has supported most of Gaza’s 2m people for the past seven decades. Now the cash is running out.
Moreover, since the end of March a series of protests near the border fence with Israel has seen at least 120 Gazans shot dead by the Israeli army. Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, has been sending a defiant wave of home-made rockets and mortars into Israel, plus makeshift kites laden with devices to set fire to Israeli farmland. Israel has responded with air raids. Gazans are terrified that Israel may be preparing for another full-blooded war to crush Hamas or even force it to make way for Fatah, the Palestinian movement’s more amenable wing that runs the West Bank, the bigger chunk of a would-be Palestinian state.
Get our daily newsletterUpgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor’s Picks.
UNRWA is in crisis. It has been begging rich Arab countries to make up some of the shortfall. The agency, which educates 270,000 children in Gaza and runs a score of clinics there, says that about $200m is needed to keep the show going. “We do not have enough money in the bank to open our schools when the academic year begins in August,” says Chris Gunness, the agency’s spokesman. “We feed a million food-insecure refugees in Gaza, where the situation has reached breaking point.”
UNRWA’s American and Israeli detractors say that many of its beneficiaries should not be counted as refugees at all, since most are second- or third-generation descendants of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled or were evicted from what became Israel in 1948. They accuse the agency of pandering to a false notion that the Palestinians will get back their old homes in Israel. Earlier this year America promised a sharp increase in aid to Jordan, which hosts 2m registered Palestinian refugees and is strapped for cash. Some Palestinians fear that this American largesse could depend on Jordan eventually revoking their status as refugees.
Some Israeli generals, however, fear the prospect of UNRWA’s being gutted. They see it as a safety valve for keeping Palestinians more or less quiescent. Otherwise, they reckon, Gaza may blow up again.