Today Jerusalem’s mayor Nir Barkat promised to kick out the UN agency responsible for refugee services, saying the move will support Israeli “sovereignty and unity of Jerusalem,” and called to “increase the Israelization” of East Jerusalem.

According to multiple reports, in early September the Trump administration will issue a report recognizing no more than half a million Palestinian refugees, will reject any right of return, and ominously will ask Israel to ‘reconsider’ UNRWA’s mandate to operate in the West Bank. Marilyn Garson writes, “Trump and those around him have spent the year trying to obviate – rather than solve – Palestinian claims. Now they wish to deny the refugee status of 90% of Palestinians. If Trump has his way, only a few elderly refugees will remain.  The Right of Return will be moot. It would not exist now, he says, if UNRWA didn’t keep it alive. He will make the right disappear by de-funding UNRWA and de-registering its five million phantom refugees.  The realization of Palestinian rights may be a marathon, but right now, it is also a sprint.  The race is on, to be made to vanish or to be seen and heard.”

Scenes of chaos erupted in Gaza City on Wednesday, after UNRWA — the UN agency responsible for providing services for Palestinian refugees — announced that it would be laying off hundreds of its employees following massive US budget cuts this year. One Palestinian man, an employee at UNRWA, attempted to set himself on fire.

Gaza’s Great March of Return has reinvigorated a specious argument against UNRWA:  by upholding Palestinians’ rights as they are written into international human rights law and UN resolutions, UNRWA’s very existence is said to perpetuate the conflict. The real aim of this argument is to eliminate the refugee issue entirely.

Early plans for UNRWA showed an unquestionably strong American influence. They also reveal the dissonance of US policy in the Middle East.

Palestinians in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp have expressed their mounting anxiety over a US decision to slash funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Ahmad Abu Salem, who owns a small shop in Aida camp, tells Mondoweiss, “UNRWA is all we have. We don’t have any alternatives if they continue cutting services. We would have no jobs and nowhere to go. If these cuts continue the situation here could explode. Without UNRWA we have nothing.”

The money the US gives to UNRWA is not ‘aid.’ It is an infinitesimal downpayment on restitution owed Palestinians. The US remains Israel’s principal benefactor, and underwriter of Israel’s anti-Palestinian terror. US “aid” to Israel enables it to keep five million once-productive people destitute, leading lost lives in the squalor of scattered refugee camps, because they are the wrong ethnicity.

The well-being of millions of Palestinian refugees is now being used as a weapon in the Trump administration’s political assault on Palestinians. Reduced U.S. funding to UNRWA, the U.N. agency responsible for offering services to Palestinian refugees, will result in direct cuts to education, healthcare, social services, infrastructure, microfinance, and emergency assistance. Mohamed Mohamed says, “It is no exaggeration to say that without these services, I might not be alive today.”

In a sign that the United States is ratcheting up pressure on Palestinian leadership, the Trump administration sent notice to the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) that it is withholding over half of this year’s annual commitment, paying $60 million and freezing another $65 million. The move indicates the U.S. is leveraging its financial support to pressure Palestinian officials into acquiescing to its vision for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

“On the first night of the bombing, the Israeli navy shelled Beach Camp to the north, firing explosives into a thickly populated refugee camp that had no weapons to return fire. A few blocks inland, members of my team taught their children to dance to the peculiar backbeat of naval fire, to distract them from their fear. The colleagues living nearest me wanted to leave their families, to pick me up and shelter me in their homes,” writes Marilyn Garson, who worked for Mercy Corps and UNRWA in Gaza between 2011 and 2015, where she lived through two wars. Read her incredible memoir of that tumultuous time, which included her coming to understand her connection to Judaism while under fire from Israeli warplanes.