The United Arab Emirates drastically reduced its funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees in 2020, the year it signed a U.S.-brokered normalization accord with Israel that was heavily criticized by the Palestinian Authority.
The agency known as UNRWA provides education, health care and other vital services to some 5.7 million registered Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, mainly descendants of the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation.
The UAE donated $51.8 million to UNRWA in 2018 and again in 2019, but in 2020 it gave the agency just $1 million, agency spokesman Sami Mshasha said Friday, after it was first reported by Israeli media. "We really are hoping that in 2021 they will go back to the levels of the previous years," he said.