The European Union’s 2022-24 UNRWA aid budget will be 40% lower than during the previous three-year period, the E.U. announced last week.The new budget will provide $82 million annually, compared to the previous average annual figure of $135 million, according to the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), a Jerusalem-based nonprofit that monitors educational materials around the world for extremist content.An additional $15 million was granted through the E.U.’s Food and Resilience Facility for 2022 to help ensure food security following the impact of the Ukraine crisis, according to the report.
I don't think these numbers are quite right. The EU budget is €82,000,000, which is $86,000,000. If you add the food programme (also in euros, not dollars) it comes out to over $102,000,000 budgeted this year.
However, this is a reduction from EU funding in the past. In 2019, the EU pledged a total of $132 million, and $157 million in 2020 (including a large pledge for Syrian refugees.) In 2021 that was reduced to $118 million.
So even $102 million in 2022 is a 13.5% reduction from 2021 and a 35% reduction from 2021.
This doesn't include any emergency funding that the EU might make available later this year, as UNRWA will inevitably say that it will have to close up shop when they cannot pay salaries and its workers will go on strike, as they do every few months. The numbers I quoted for previous years included not only the base budget but additional funding added under other appeals and projects, which may yet be added this year.
So while I don't think the reduction of 40% is accurate, there is a pattern of the EU reducing the amount it sends to UNRWA while UNRWA's count of "registered refugees" keeps increasing forever.
Considering that Gulf contributions to UNRWA have all but dried up since the mid-2010s, UNRWA will one day seen face a reckoning: either change its definition of "refugee" to be more in line with the Refugee Convention, or risk going bankrupt. There is absolutely no reason why UNRWA should spend hundreds of millions on "refugees" who are full Jordanian citizens, or "refugees" who live in the area of British Mandate Palestine they are supposedly refugees from.
That is a conversation that no one is willing to have because Palestinians will turn to violence if there is a hint of reduction of services. And the world would rather appease Palestinian threats rather than face facts.
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