LONDON (Middle East Eye) – The United Kingdom has halved its donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), deepening the international agency’s financial crisis and endangering the lives and wellbeing of the estimated 5.7 million Palestinian refugees it assists.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of UNRWA, said the UK had more than halved its funds for UNRWA from £42.5mn ($57.2mn) in 2020 to £20.8mn ($28mn) in 2021.
He warned of a total collapse after the funding cuts, which would affect health and educational services offered to Palestinian refugees in the occupied West Bank, besieged Gaza Strip, and in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
“It is a direct impact of this policy decision to reduce the aid budget from the equivalent of 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5%,” Lazzarini told The Guardian.
“It has a humanitarian impact. It has a human development impact. We calculate the decrease in aid as the equivalent of more than 70,000 boys and girls in our schools.”
In April, the UK government decided to cut its foreign aid spending by 0.2 percent, from £14.5bn a year in 2020 to £11.1bn for the 2021 financial year, which ends in April 2022.
Founded in 1948, UNRWA was set to provide aid programs for almost 750,000 Palestinian refugees who were expelled by Zionist militias from their villages and towns during the establishment of the state of the occupying regime - an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.
The current figure for refugees registered as eligible to receive aid from UNRWA is 5.7 million.
Larzzini, who was visiting London, urged the UK government to rethink its position over funding UNRWA, saying that donations to the agency have “become so unstable it is causing an existential threat to the organization. Year after year, we are in an ever more exacerbated situation.”
UNRWA’s biggest financial blow came in 2018, when the U.S. cut its yearly contribution from $360mn to $60mn, before cutting all funding in 2019 - leaving the organization cash-strapped.