Gaza _ Palestine News Network
The administration of US President Donald Trump has taken seven serious decisions that have struck the depth of the Palestinian cause, despite the fact that less than two years have passed since Trump took office in the United States of America.
These actions, according to Palestinian and Arab officials, are destroying the Middle East peace process.
The latest such decision was the closure of the PLO office in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
These successive resolutions, following the rejection of the Palestinians, come to the American peace plan, which has not yet been officially announced, and is known as the "Deal of the Century", but frequent leaks have confirmed that it includes a serious erosion of Palestinian rights, especially with regard to the city of Jerusalem, and a dossier Refugees and settlement.
According to several sources, the plan is based on giving Palestinians autonomy in the West Bank, recognizing the legality of Israeli settlement.
The plan also seeks to end the right of return for Palestinians and to remove the refugee issue.
The plan also calls for the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel only, and for the Palestinians to be given a capital in a suburb of Abu Dis, near the city.
The following is a monitoring of the decisions taken by the Trump administration, against the Palestinian cause, since the Palestinian presidency declared its rejection of the "Deal of the century" plan.
1. Recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel:
On 6 December 2017, US president Donald Trump officially announced his administration´s recognition of the occupied Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in a move that has received Arab, international and Islamic condemnation and criticism.
In his speech, Trump directed the foreign ministry to begin the process of transferring the embassy to Jerusalem, the first embassy in the occupied city.
Trump´s decision provoked a major Palestinian outrage, with protests in the occupied Palestinian territories, which resulted in the martyrdom and wounding of many Palestinians.
Since the US Congress passed a law in 1995 to transfer the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, US presidents have been postponing the six-month approval of the move, the tradition of Trump.
2-reducing aid to the "UNRWA ":
On January 16, Washington began to curtail its aid to the Palestinian Refugees Agency (UNRWA), freezing some $300 million of its assistance to the Palestinian Refugees Agency (UNRWA), which is about 365 million dollars.
That action exacerbated the financial crisis that UNRWA was already experiencing, causing several decisions by the Agency´s administration that led to the curtailment of its services in the Palestinian refugee camps. According to Anatolia
This financial crisis was seen by Washington´s cutbacks to support it as the "largest in its history."
"UNRWA" was established by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in 1949 to provide assistance and protection to some 5 million Palestine refugees in its five areas of operation: Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, West Bank and Gaza Strip.
3. Relocation of the embassy to Jerusalem:
About five months after Washington´s first decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, its embassy was actually transferred from Tel Aviv to the city on May 14, May.
In a subsequent letter, Trump said that his country´s embassy in Jerusalem "Removes the Jerusalem dossier from any (Palestinian-Israeli) negotiations."
That decision provoked the outrage of Arab, Muslim and foreign governments, and triggered a wave of protests in the Gaza Strip in which Israel committed a massacre in which 62 Palestinians were killed in a single day.
4-cut the entire aid for "UNRWA ":
Months after the decision to cut aid, the US administration decided on August 3 August to cut all its financial aid to UNRWA.
In a statement, US State Department spokeswoman Heather maneuvered said that Washington had decided not to make further contributions to UNRWA any more.
She said the United States had previously warned that, after its last contribution, it "will not bear the large portion of this burden alone" by more than $60 million in January last January.
The Palestinians viewed the decision as "a serious us escalation against the Palestinians aimed at removing the right of return and closing the refugee issue."
Only 40, 000 Palestinian refugees!
In the same vein, on 4 August August, the American magazine Foreign Policy revealed that the Trump administration, supported by his son-in-law, Jared Kouchner, and members of Congress, were working to end the status of "refugee" for millions of Palestinians in order to stop the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
The magazine quoted us and Palestinian officials as "not disclosed" that those efforts were aimed at "removing this issue from the table in any possible negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians."
At least two draft laws were currently being tabled in Congress in order to advance the issue.
The magazine said it had received Kouchner e-mails with officials of the US administration, explicitly calling for "the need to stop the work of UNRWA."
A member of the US Congress was quoted by the newspaper "Yisrael Hume" on July 30 July as saying that it is seeking to enact a new law which considers the number of Palestinian refugees to be only 40,000 out of the 5.9 million registered in the agency "UNRWA".
A member of the House of Representatives/"Dag Lambourne " of the Republican Party aims to reduce U.S. support for UNRWA, by restricting the definition of the Palestinian refugee to those displaced during the Nakba only and by excluding their descendants from subsequent generations.
According to the congressman, the background to the new law is linked to the difference in the definition of the United Nations between the Palestinian refugee and the other refugees in the world who are sponsored by other UN organizations other than "UNRWA".
The difference, according to Lamorn, is that the definition of a non-Palestinian refugee is confined to the first generation, while the generations of Palestinians inherit the status of asylum.
The newspaper attributed to congressional sources that the number would be limited to 40,000 refugees since the 1948 war, a very small number compared to the "UNRWA " data.
5-cut the entire assistance to the Palestinian Authority:
On August 2, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, in remarks at a press conference in the Central West Bank city of Ramallah, said the US administration had decided to stop all assistance to the Palestinians.
This includes the resolution "direct assistance to Treasury and indirect, which comes in favour of infrastructure projects and development projects." According to praise God.
"We have officially told us that the aid will stop, the direct aid has essentially stopped and no US dollars have been entered into the Treasury for months, while other aid has either been stopped immediately or is being stopped, and there are projects that will not be renewed as soon as they are finished," he said.
The White House issued a statement, stating that Washington had redirected more than 200 million dollars earmarked for economic assistance to the West Bank and Gaza to projects elsewhere around the world.
Until 2012, the average U.S. budget support for Palestinians was between $250 and $300 million, according to Palestinian budgetary data.
Last year 2017, U.S. support for the Palestinian budget reached $75 million, 80 million dollars in 2016 and nearly $100 million in 2015.
The average annual U.S. support for Palestine over the past 10 years since 2008 is about $600 million and in some years has reached $800 million, spread over the Treasury, UNRWA and local community institutions.
6. Closure of the Office of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington:
The Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Saeb Erekat, announced Monday (September 10th) that the US administration had officially informed them of its decision to close the organization´s office in Washington.
"We have been officially informed that the US administration will close our embassy in Washington in punishment for continuing to work with the International Criminal Court against Israeli war crimes and will take down the flag of Palestine in Washington, D.C.," Erekat said in a statement published by the Palestinian news agency WAFA.
7. Stop Supporting Jerusalem Hospitals:
The US State Department announced on Sept. 7 that it had withheld 25 million dollars in aid to six Palestinian hospitals in Jerusalem.
Hospitals operating in East Jerusalem provide medical services to Palestinian residents of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.
Some of the medical services available in the Jerusalem hospitals are not available in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, such as oncology and ophthalmology.
The hospitals of East Jerusalem are: Al-Maqamat Islamic Charitable Society Hospital, Red Crescent Hospital, St John Eye Hospital, Princess Basma Foundation, Saint Joseph Hospital (fame: French) and the USTA Victoria Hospital-Insider.
Medical officials in Palestinian hospitals warned of "catastrophic results from the US decision."
