Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Trump Plans New $65M Cut In Humanitarian Aid To Palestinians

The Trump administration will announce a decision within days to cancel funding for a U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees, several people familiar with the decision said on Friday.

The administration pledged $60 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in January but withheld another $65 million pending a review. That remaining $65 million now will be canceled, the sources said.

The withdrawal of the U.S. funding will be a blow to an agency that currently supports more than 5 million people in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank and Gaza.

The move, which comes a week after Washington cut more than $200 million in U.S. aid to the Palestinians, is likely to heighten tensions between the Palestinian leadership and the Trump administration.

Senior members of the Trump administration have been overtly critical of UNRWA, including national security adviser John Bolton. The Palestinian leadership has angered the White House by boycotting its peace efforts since President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the embassy there in a reversal of decades of U.S. policy.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.