Just days after Palestinian children returned back to school, the Trump administration announced it would be cutting all funding to UNRWA — the UN agency responsible for providing life saving services to 5 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East. Mondoweiss spoke with some of those affected, who expressed fears of losing essential services like food assistance, jobs, water, and most importantly, education.
On Saturday, the Trump administration’s announced it would be cutting $25 million in aid to Palestinian hospitals in occupied East Jerusalem. “We ask the American government, why do the sick people in the hospital have to pay the price of political conflict?” the Secretary General of the East Jerusalem Hospital Network Walid Namur asked during a press conference on Monday. “We are humanitarian organizations and hospitals, and should be left out of political problems. We serve to treat sick people.”
The Trump administration ordered a Palestinian representative office to close today, ending the near 25-year diplomatic presence of the PLO Mission in Washington DC. “This is yet another affirmation of the Trump Administration’s policy to collectively punish the Palestinian people, including by cutting financial support for humanitarian services including health and education,” PLO official Saeb Erekat said in a statement.
In the middle of the night, as bulldozers and armed Israeli soldiers surrounded his home, Khaled Abu Kheyara, 32, woke up his three young children and told them their home was being destroyed. “It was around 3:30am when the soldiers arrived to our home,” Abu Kheyara told Mondoweiss as he sat among all his family’s belongings in his new home — a small tent made of metal rods and tarp. “We barely had any time to take out all of our belongings before they started demolishing the house,” he said. Abu Kheyara’s home, which he shared with his brother and his family, was the first of four buildings that Israeli forces destroyed on Monday morning in the Bethlehem-area village of al-Walaja, in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli High Court rejected on Wednesday petitions filed by the Bedouins of Khan al-Ahmar against the demolition of the village, paving the way for Israel to demolish the entire community any time after September 12. The decision was the final greenlight for the government to forcibly evacuate and destroy Khan al-Ahmar, a project that it has been pursuing for years in order to create a bloc of illegal Israeli settlements in the area.
As the US declares it will stop assistance to UNRWA, the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem was fraught with worry. “Do you think the kids will go to school tomorrow?” a woman asked. “May God help us,” another could be heard saying.
Earlier this month, health officials in Gaza announced that they would be stopping chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients due to a shortage of medicine. As a result, the lives of thousands of cancer patients were thrown into uncertainty. Doctors, rights groups, and the patients themselves have pointed chiefly to the more than decade-long Israeli blockade of Gaza as a reason for the shortages.
Israel’s High Court overturned on Sunday evening the security cabinet’s previous decision to prevent five Palestinian women, mostly cancer patients, from Gaza from receiving life-saving treatment in occupied East Jerusalem on the basis that the women had relatives that were active in the Hamas movement. The court ruled that “the decision to deny Gaza patients access to medical treatment as means of leverage over Hamas was ineffective and illegal.”
The US State Department announced on Friday that it would be cutting $200 million in funding to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, sparking outrage among Palestinian officials, who are still reeling from US cuts to UNRWA earlier this year. Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, released a statement following the decision, calling the move “cheap blackmail” and “coercion,” saying that “the Palestinian people and leadership will not be intimidated,” and “the rights of the Palestinian people are not for sale.”
Israeli authorities have approved over 1,000 new illegal settlement units in the occupied West Bank, sparking condemnation from both Palestinian and international officials. According to Peace Now, since the election of US President Donald Trump, the Israeli government has promoted plans for 10,536 units and tenders for 5,679 units in settlements in the occupied West Bank.