Palestinians say US cuts US program to shut down schools and clinics

"Education, especially here in the camp, is the key to a better future. Schools need funding, "said Sa'ad, father of three young children. Nearby, dozens of children ducked on the narrow main road of the camp as they returned from a primary school funded by this program, called the United Nations Refugee and Labor Office, called UNRWA .

Sa'ad is also concerned that the Trump administration will try to drastically reduce the number of Palestinians classified as refugees. Like many Palestinians, Sa'ad hopes to return to the house his family has left in present-day Israel. But the prospect of repatriation – what Palestinians call the "right of return" – is limited to refugees certified by the Office.

"I dream of freedom, of the end of the Israeli occupation, but I am afraid of never being able to recover our home and our land," Sa'ad told USA TODAY.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Friday that the US could no longer "shoulder a disproportionate share of UNRWA's cost burden." America has always been the main donor of the program. An annual budget of more than a billion dollars in recent years.

But Nauert also criticized UNRWA's mandate to grant refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of refugees displaced from Israel during the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, creating a community of beneficiaries

In announcing her decision not to provide funding to the United Nations Office for Refugees and Labor, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the United States could no longer "assume significant cost of UNRWA. (Photo: AFP PHOTO / Mandel Ngan)

UNRWA was created in 1949 after 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The agency was to be temporary – operating until that date. that a peace agreement regulates the status of these refugees.

Nearly 70 years later, UNRWA serves 5.4 million Palestinian refugees. Meanwhile, the prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal seem darker than ever. And the right of Palestinians to return remains one of the biggest obstacles to a resolution – an essential demand of the Palestinians and a non-partisan of Israel.

Israeli leaders say that a large influx of Palestinians would turn Israel into a Palestinian country, denying the goal of creating a Jewish state. In a preventive gesture, the Israeli government recently adopted a "nation state law" which codifies Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday hailed the freezing of US funds for UNRWA, calling it a "perpetuation agency for refugees."

UNRWA leaders say that its mandate determines how and why many refugees are eligible for this designation. And it is only morally right, they say, that the "family unit" is taken into account in trying to help people displaced by the conflict, whether in the West Bank or elsewhere in the world.

UNRWA spokesman, Chris Gunness, said the increase in the Palestinian refugee population was not a problem created by the US agency.

"The reason the numbers are rising is that peace processors – basically the international community – have failed to resolve the refugee status of these people," he said. "It is the conflict that perpetuates UNRWA and not UNRWA that perpetuates the conflict."

Gunness said the Trump administration's decision was right in the refugee camps.

"The feeling of shock and apprehension is palpable," he said. While UNRWA was able to open schools on time last week, Gunness said the agency had enough money until the end of September. Several other countries, from Germany to Jordan, are struggling to see if they can fill the funding gap.

If they can not, "the consequences for the refugees we serve are catastrophic," said Gunness. "We will have to stop educating 526,000 children," he added, along with cuts to health care and other services.

Dave Harden, who has worked extensively in the West Bank and Gaza as a senior Obama agency official for the US Agency for International Development, said Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and his senior adviser to the 39; UNRWA.

He said Kushner and others were right that the US agency needed to be reorganized.

"Make no mistake, this assistance saves lives for the most vulnerable," wrote Harden in a recent editorial. "But after 70 years, the structure and incentives became necessary to create dependence on social assistance. Most Palestinians would prefer the dignity of a state, a job and the potential of a real future as the delivery of food baskets, generation after generation. "

But according to Harden, the decision to zap funding will have dire consequences – sowing further instability in the region and weakening US influence, as Kushner prepares to unveil Trump's long-awaited peace proposal.

"We will create a void and we will lose influence," Harden said. If the other donors fill the budget deficit, the United States will become "irrelevant," he added, or could give power to Hamas and Hezbollah. Both are considered terrorist organizations by the US State Department.

Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar Ilan University, called UNRWA a "political and non-humanitarian organization".

"Repatriation is an option, not a guaranteed right, and both parties must agree," Steinberg said. "Yet this is the only narrative that UNRWA presents.All other refugees, taken care of by the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency), lose their refugee status when They become permanent residents or citizens of another country. "

Steinberg said supporters of the Palestinian right of return "forget that the United Nations has created two states: a Jewish state and an Arab state. Jews accepted and absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries. The Arabs rejected it, declared war and became refugees.

In Dheisheh refugee camp, Sa'ad was not the only Palestinian trying to keep his dream of going home alive, despite the latest news.

Yazan Alsaqa, 18, a university student who works at a sandwich shop in Dhaisheh, said he did not care if the United States considered him a refugee. Walking behind the sandwich bar, where he was putting falafels and jesters in a pita pocket, Alsaqa produced a piece of paper declaring his refugee status.

"My grandfather was a refugee, my parents are refugees, I am a refugee. Nobody can say the opposite.

Hanan Abu Ajemiya, a 48-year-old grocery owner, was less optimistic.

"I'm worried," she said. "I want the right to return to my ancestral home in Palestine. I do not think I can ever come back, but I can not give up hope.

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