Twelve of the agency\u2019s 13,000 Gaza employees were allegedly part of the 7 October attack \u2013 so the US and its allies are meting a horrific collective punishment<\/p>\n
On Friday, the United States suspended<\/a> funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Multiple western countries then followed the US\u2019s lead. The given reason? The Israeli government alleges that a dozen people<\/a> <\/strong>working for UNRWA (which employs<\/a> around 13,000 people in Gaza alone) were involved in the assaults of 7 October that killed around 1,200 people in Israel.<\/p>\n There should be no question that the 7 October attacks were atrocities. But to punish the UNRWA \u2013 and, by extension, the Palestinian people as a whole \u2013 because of accusations against 12 people is unconscionable. It is an act of political retaliation that puts the lives of millions of people needlessly at risk and an abdication on an international scale of the United States\u2019 supposed western liberal values.<\/p>\n Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twelve of the agency\u2019s 13,000 Gaza employees were allegedly part of the 7 October attack \u2013 so the US and its allies are meting a horrific collective punishment On Friday, the United States suspended funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}