All countries that had suspended funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees have resumed funding by now, with the exception of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the latter is considering resuming funding, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Friday.
At the end of the Donors’ Conference held in New York, Lazzarini explained that the donations received up to this Friday allow the agency to continue operating until the end of September, when this morning they only guaranteed its regular operation until the end of August.
Last January, UNRWA was accused by Israel of employing at least 12 members of Hamas’s armed wing who had participated in the terrorist attacks of 7 October last year, and that accusation led 16 countries, including major donors – the US, Germany, Japan, Canada and the UK – to announce that they were freezing their funding to the agency, which provides most of the basic services in the West Bank and Gaza.
In the following months, Israel stepped up its attacks on UNRWA, saying that 450 of its employees were “terrorists” or that 17 percent of its staff were members of Hamas, without providing evidence for its claims.
The UN Department of Internal Affairs opened an investigation into the twelve accused by Israel that has not yet been completed, and in parallel appointed a commission that concluded that the agency had mechanisms to guarantee the neutrality of its work, although the latter might be improved.
During Friday’s conference, which was not attended by the United States, these main donors explained that they have been lifting their veto on UNRWA in the past weeks or months, while the British ambassador, Barbara Woodward, acknowledged that following the last elections in her country (won overwhelmingly by the Labour Party), the new head of diplomacy was “seriously reconsidering resuming funding.”
The United States, which was UNRWA’s main donor before the Gaza war, cannot resume funding before March 2025 due to an express ban by Congress, which voted overwhelmingly once morest all donations to the agency last March.
Today’s conference became a unanimous call to support the work of UNRWA as the “backbone of the humanitarian response in Palestine”, as the UN often repeats, recalling that the agency provides between 70% and 80% of medical services in Gaza, and its schools welcomed half of school-age children (300,000) before the war.
“I think we have received a powerful message of solidarity today,” Lazzanni said at a press conference at the end of the conference, recalling that in just one day the agency has managed to guarantee its daily operations (paying its 30,000 employees and continuing to provide health and education, mainly) for another month.
New York / EFE
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2024-07-14 21:07:32
