Arab financial support for UNRWA has gone down over 80% since 2018

As it does every year, UNRWA is saying that it is in danger of closing down unless it raises more money.

This is even though the Biden administration has restored some $150 million that had been slashed by the Trump administration.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philip Lazzarini said that UNRWA needs emergency funds of $120 million to keep the agency afloat.

One of the reasons he mentions, though, is most interesting.

While he noted that funding for UNRWA has gone down from nations such as Great Britain, he stressed that Arab support for UNRWA decreased from $200 million in 2018 to only about $89 million in 2019 and $37 million in 2020.

That is an 81.5% decrease in funds from the Arab world in three years!

Most of the Arab funds seem to have been emergency funding, though. In UNRWA's published budgets, Arab nations have always been a relatively tiny part of their funding. In 2012, only $6 million of UNRWA's $520M budget came from Arab countries:

If the 2020 donations from Arab countries were only $37 million, that means that the Arab nations reneged on their pledges - UNRWA's expected budget for 2020 included $132 million from the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait:

Arab nations have often reneged on pledges to Palestinian causes, but reneging on pledges to a UN agency is notable. 

It shows that Arab support for Palestinians has plummeted in recent years. 

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