UN schools for Palestinians reopen despite US funding cut

Tens of thousands of Palestinian children returned to United Nations-run schools after the summer holidays on Wednesday, though major US cuts have thrown their funding into jeopardy beyond next month.

Children wearing checkered uniforms and backpacks thronged schools across the Palestinian Authority for the first classes of the new school year, AFP correspondents reported.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said all 711 schools it runs for 526,000 pupils in Gaza and the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria would reopen in the next few days despite the $300 million US funding cut.

Fears raised by UN chief Antonio Guterres that the schools might not be able to reopen at all failed to materialize but UNRWA warned it might still be forced to close them again in a month if additional new funding is not found.

“At the moment, we do not have enough money to keep the schools open after the end of September,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told AFP. “At the end of September, UNRWA will be running on empty for all its services, including schools and medical facilities.”

In 2017, the United States, which is traditionally the largest single donor to UNRWA, contributed more than $350 million.

But so far this year, it has given just $65 million following US President Donald Trump’s decision to withhold aid to the Palestinians.

Parents expressed deep concern about the uncertainty hanging over their children’s education.

“We are afraid of the schools closing,” Soha Abu Hasara told AFP in Gaza City as she dropped her children off for their first day back at school.

“There is fear and the situation is not stable, and there is tension within UNRWA,” she said.

UNRWA was formed to support the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 war that accompanied the creation of Israel.

With their descendants, they now number more than three million across the Middle East.

The United States has sought to use its aid to pressure the Palestinian government into resuming dealings with it after a nearly nine-month rupture.

Trump’s unilateral decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the embassy delighted the Israelis and enraged the Palestinians, who want to establish their future capital in the east of the city, and who say Trump’s decision ignores their demands.

The Palestinians see Trump as unfairly biased toward Israel. They have cut off most contacts with the Trump administration and pre-emptively rejected a peace plan expected to be unveiled by the White House in the near future.

Last week, Trump canceled a further $200 million in aid projects for Palestinians not funded through UNRWA.

Senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi accused the US president of resorting to “cheap blackmail as a political tool.”

Last month, UNRWA announced it was cutting more than 250 jobs in the Palestinian Authority due to the funding crisis.

Israel accuses UNRWA of helping to perpetuate the Palestinian narrative of Israel’s illegitimacy by, uniquely, 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. The population of Palestinian refugees thus grows each year.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged that funding for Palestinian refugees be maintained, but not through UNRWA. Rather, he has called for it to be transferred through the UN’s main refugee body, UNHCR.

Israel has often criticized UNRWA, accusing it of sheltering terrorists and allowing Palestinians to remain refugees even after settling in a new city or country for many generations, thus complicating a possible resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

UN officials and others say that the agency provides vital services to the vulnerable communities under its mandate.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, has been pushing to remove the refugee status of millions of Palestinians as part of an apparent effort to shutter UNRWA, according to emails published earlier this month by Foreign Policy magazine.

“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA,” Kushner wrote in an email dated January 11, just days before the US froze $65 million in funding for UNRWA. “This [agency] perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.”

“Our goal can’t be to keep things stable and as they are… Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things in order to get there,” he added in the email, according to Foreign Policy.