20 Apr 2024


Press TV - Washington is set to announce that it will no longer recognize millions of Palestinian refugees' "right of return" to the Israel occupied territories, Israeli media reports.

According to Israel's Hadashot News on Saturday, the administration of US President Donald Trump will make the announcement over the next few days, in which it will claim that only around one million Palestinians are eligible for refugee status.

The claim will contradict UN statistics which classify over five million Palestinians as refugees.

Earlier this month, the American magazine Foreign Policy obtainedemailswritten by Jared Kushner, Trumps senior adviser and son-in-law, to senior US officialsin which he pressured Jordan to remove the refugee status of millions of Palestinians in a bid to disrupt UNRWA's work.

Washington has on multiple occasions voiced opposition over treating the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees themselves.

In January, the US government announced that it wouldwithhold$65 million of a$125million aid installment to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

On Friday, the United States also canceled over $200 million in funds for the Palestinian Authority.

Also on Friday, the UNRWA head suggested that the US hadslashed the agency's budget to punish the Palestinians for their criticism of Washington's recognition of Jerusalem al-Quds as Israels "capital."

I can say with a great degree of confidence that the decision was not related to UNRWAs performancebecause in November I had received very constructive and openly positive feedback on those issues, Pierre Kraehenbuehl told the Associated Press.

A few weeks later, tensions increased around the question of Jerusalem [al-Quds], he added. It appears that the humanitarian funding to UNRWA got caught up in the deep polarization around that question.

US-Palestine ties deterioratedlast December, when Trump declared Jerusalem al-Quds as the capital of Israel and announced plans to transfer the embassy from Tel Aviv to the occupied city.

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