"We have been given to understand that certainly for this year, we should not expect any US funding and we have built zero US funding into our planning assumptions for next year," UNRWA spokesperson Christopher Gunness told Sputnik.
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He added that depriving "5.4 million hungry, angry, under-educated people in the Middle East" of the funding hardly added to peace, but UNRWA had already started seeking non-US funding to replace the budget.
"We have robustly gone after non-US funding among traditional donors and emerging markets. And we have been unprecedentedly successful. In just seven months we have raised 238 million dollars – 50 million from Saudi Arabia, 50 million from the UAE, but countries like Turkey and Russia have also been very generous. However, we still have a deficit for this year of $217 million," the spokesperson said.
In January, the US State Department announced that it had frozen $65 million out of the planned $125 million for the UNRWA this year. The decision came after Trump said that Palestinians lacked the willingness to hold peace talks with Israel and had no respect for the United States, despite the financial aid it provided.
