US halts funding to UN Palestine agency

The United States has halted all funding to a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees in a decision further heightening tensions between the Palestinian leadership and the Trump administration.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the decision as “a flagrant assault against the Palestinian people and a defiance of UN resolutions”.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the business model and fiscal practices of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) made it an “irredeemably flawed operation”.

Read the article by Lesley Wroughton andAli Sawafta in The Australian (Reuters).

[Editor: Interesting to note that Netanyahu has done a backflip on this issue having originally spoken out against such a move.]