UN Palestinian refugee agency says it will ax 250 jobs after US funding cuts

500 more full-time UNRWA staff will be offered part-time positions following Washington’s decision to slash 2018 funds to a sixth of previous year

By AFP and ToI Staff 25 July 2018, 4:03 pm

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Palestinian employees of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA take part in a protest against job cuts announced by the agency, at its headquarters in Gaza City July 25, 2018. (SAID KHATIB/AFP)

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees announced Wednesday it was cutting more than 250 jobs in the Palestinian territories after the United States held back hundreds of millions in aid.

In total, 154 employees in the West Bank and 113 in the Gaza Strip will be let go, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said in a statement. More than 500 other full-time staff will be offered part-time contracts, the statement added.

The job cuts were the first since the US announced it would only provide the agency with $60 million this year, down from $360 the previous year.

Gunness’s statement said the cut represented an “existential threat” to UNRWA, which had been trying to raise the money from other donors.

The agency, which provides services to more than three million Palestinian refugees and their descendants across the Middle East, was seeking to “protect core services, including education, health and relief,” he said.

Palestinian schoolgirls pose for a group picture outside their classrooms at a school belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza City on January 22, 2018, during a visit by the UNRWA Commissioner General (AFP PHOTO / MAHMUD HAMS)

Protests against the cuts were being held in Gaza on Wednesday.

In January, US President Donald Trump linked the cutting of Palestinian aid to the decision by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to refuse to talk with his administration.

The Palestinian leadership froze ties with the White House after it recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and accuses Trump’s administration of blatant bias in favor of the Jewish state.

UNRWA was established after the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948 when more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled.

It offers support for those refugees and their descendants in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank and Gaza, providing services for more than three million people.

Israel accuses UNRWA of helping to perpetuate the Palestinian narrative of Israel’s illegitimacy, by granting refugee status to the descendants of refugees, even when they are born in other countries and have citizenship there, conditions that do not apply to the refugees cared for by the UN’s main refugee agency, UNHCR, which cares for all other refugees worldwide. It has pushed for the body to be dissolved and the refugees cared for by the UNHCR.

UNRWA counters that it is caring for a population that is scattered in several countries in the region, but is not served either by Israel or those countries, which refuse to grant most of them or their descendants citizenship, and that its definition of the refugees reflects that reality.