Palestine Center Brief No. 346 (Decemeber 11, 2020)
By Dalal Yassine
“On 23 November, UNRWA – the UN agency for Palestine refugees – held an extraordinary meeting of its advisory committee.
There, Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, informed the committee that it faced an unprecedented situation. With a budget deficit of $115 million, Lazzarini said, UNRWA would be unable to pay the full salaries of its 28,000 employees in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Thus, and just as a second wave of COVID-19 sweeps across the globe, UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees it serves face an uncertain future.
The meeting came less than three weeks after Joe Biden was elected US president. Although UNRWA’s financial crisis is mainly caused by US aid cuts, there is no guarantee that a Biden administration will reverse the policies of the last two years or the even longer period of budget cuts and reduced services that UNRWA has endured.
In August 2018, President Donald Trump announced that the US would cut all financial assistance to UNRWA – which had stood at nearly $365 million annually or more than a third of the agency’s total budget.
The US had been the agency’s largest donor and the move created a severe financial crisis as contributions from the Arab Gulf states and European countries were also reduced. To cover its expenses, the agency this year had to secure a loan of $20 million from the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund.”
To read this article, please click here.
This article originally appeared in Electronic Intifada.
Mohamed Mohamed is the Executive Director of the Palestine Center.
The views in this brief are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.
