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It was mid-May, about six weeks after Trump appointee Mari Stull began her new job as senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. As senior adviser at the bureau, Stull was in charge of making sure President Trump’s agenda was represented at the many international organizations the U.S. participates in and mostly funds, such as the United Nations and its various agencies. Stull and her boss, Amb. Kevin Moley, had just left for a trip to Geneva for the World Health Assembly. Back at the State Department, Erin Barclay, a senior career diplomat at the IO...

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will visit Ireland next weekend accompanied by a high-level delegation, it has been announced. The stopover will come on President Abbas’s journey to the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York. President Abbas will pay a courtesy call on President Higgins before holding a formal meeting and working dinner with the Tánaiste Simon Coveney at Farmleigh. Among the topics expected to be discussed are the humanitarian and security situation in Gaza and the West Bank, the funding crisis for UNRWA, and the future of the Middle East Peace Process.

The United States is intensifying its pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Al-Jazeera network reported on Sunday evening that the US administration has decided to immediately close all bank accounts linked to the PA or the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in banks across the United States. The US is not confirming the report at the moment, but the State Department hinted last week after the closure of the PLO’s mission in Washington that there would be further steps against the Palestinian Arabs. Earlier on Sunday, the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen television reported that the US ordered the PLO envoy to the...

Organizers of a music festival in Düsseldorf, Germany, withdrew their invitation to composer and singer Brian Eno over his longtime involvement in attempts to boycott Israel, JTA reported on Friday. Eno was slated to appear at the Electricity Conference festival in October, but last week he was among a group of artists who signed a letter urging a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest that will be held next year in Israel. Festival organizer Rüdiger Esch told the Westdeutsche Zeitung that it “was the only right decision” to disinvite Eno because “we don’t want to invite anyone who supports activities...

The United States’ decision to close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) office in Washington will make it harder to reach a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, a spokeswoman for the German foreign ministry said on Friday. […] The U.S. administration on Monday said the PLO’s office in Washington would be closed out of concern about Palestinian attempts to prompt an International Criminal Court investigation of Israel. …

The Administration has determined after careful review that the office of the General Delegation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Washington should close. We have permitted the PLO office to conduct operations that support the objective of achieving a lasting, comprehensive peace between Israelis and the Palestinians since the expiration of a previous waiver in November 2017. However, the PLO has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel. To the contrary, PLO leadership has condemned a U.S. peace plan they have not yet seen and refused to engage with the U.S. government...

National security adviser John Bolton is expected to announced Monday that the U.S. will shutter the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) office in Washington, D.C., The Wall Street Journal reported. “The Trump administration will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” Bolton is expected to say, according to a draft of his speech reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Bolton will reportedly threaten the International Criminal Court with sanctions if it carries out investigations into the U.S. and Israel. ADVERTISEMENT The action against the PLO, which serves as the main entity...

U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered that $25 million earmarked for the care of Palestinians in East Jerusalem hospitals be directed elsewhere as part of a review of aid, a State Department official said on Saturday. Trump called for a review of U.S. assistance to the Palestinians earlier this year to ensure that the funds were being spent in accordance with national interests and were providing value to taxpayers. “As a result of that review, at the direction of the President, we will be redirecting approximately $25 million originally planned for the East Jerusalem Hospital Network,” the State Department official...

Senior officials from the United Nations and a number of European nations visited an exhibition hosted by the Palestinian Authority featuring explicitly anti-Semitic images last month. According to a report by Makor Rishon on Friday, early last month, a number of foreign representatives visited an exhibition set up by the Palestinian Authority in the illegal Bedouin outpost of Khan al-Ahmar. Built in the 1990s, the illegal encampment today houses some 170 Bedouin squatters just outside of the Israeli town of Kfar Adumim, east of Jerusalem. The encampment was never authorized, and is slated for demolition, after the Supreme Court rejected...

US Senator James Lankford (R-OH) has proposed legislation that would permanently sever Washington’s funding to UNRWA if it does not change its definition of “legitimate Palestinian refugees”, reports i24news. Lankford said Thursday he was introducing a bill that would enshrine President Donald Trump’s decision to end US funding to UNRWA in law and open the door to a resumption of funding if UNRWA stops bestowing refugee status on descendants of male Palestinian Arab refugees who fled what is now Israel in 1948 or the 1967 Six Day War. “We are currently funding an entity that has ensured that a refugee...

When delusions and fantasies are substitutes for reporting. How did the Washington Post cover the end of America's UNRWA Funding?Here’s how: The United States will no longer contribute to the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, the State Department announced Friday [August 31], amid widespread Palestinian outrage charging that the decision violates international law and will aggravate an already dire humanitarian situation, particularly in Gaza. The Washington Post should explain to readers, if it can, what “international law” the “Palestinians” claim has been violated. I do not think there is any. Contributions to UNRWA are voluntary. In any case,...

The abject failure of the Oslo Accords has had a salutary effect on Israeli society. Israelis are today quite resilient, ready to endure – if necessary – protracted conflict. The Oslo process – started between Israel and the Palestinians 25 years ago – clearly failed to bring a resolution to the conflict and did not result in peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. The nearly 1,600 Israeli casualties and many more thousands of wounded during this period by Palestinian terrorist and rocket attacks testify to this failure. Yitzhak Rabin’s land-for-security formula did not work. Be the first to know -...

The State Department officially announced on Friday that the United States is ending its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for “Palestinian refugees”. “The Administration has carefully reviewed the issue and determined that the United States will not make additional contributions to UNRWA," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement. “When we made a U.S. contribution of $60 million in January, we made it clear that the United States was no longer willing to shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden of UNRWA's costs that we had assumed for many years. Several countries, including Jordan, Egypt, Sweden,...

The Trump administration has decided to cancel all U.S. funding of the United Nations aid program for Palestinian refugees, part of its determination to put its money where its policy is as it seeks a recalculation of U.S. foreign aid spending and prepares its own Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. In an announcement to be made within the next several weeks, the administration plans to voice its disapproval of the way the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, spends the funds and to call for a sharp reduction in the number of Palestinians recognized as refugees, dropping it from more than...

hen President George W. Bush sent U.S. troops into Afghanistan to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda forces following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland, nations around the world lined up in support of America – as they should have. When Israel is attacked by Palestinian terrorists from Hamas and other groups, many nations and the United Nations line up solidly against the Jewish state for daring to defend itself. No matter how much care Israel takes to prevent civilian casualties when it retaliates against terrorist attacks, it receives automatic condemnations and complaints that it has used...

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Tuesday appeared to question the world body’s count of Palestinian refugees, the latest in a series of steps by the Trump administration challenging how relief aid is delivered to the Palestinians. In remarks at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank often sympathetic to Israel, Haley agreed with a questioner who suggested that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), which helps Palestinian refugees, overcounts their number. The United States earlier this year cut its aid to UNWRA to $60 million from a promised $350 million for the...

The Trump administration announced Friday that it is cutting more than $200 million in aid to the Palestinians, following a review, commissioned by President Trump, of U.S. assistance projects in Gaza and West Bank."At the direction of President Trump, we have undertaken a review of U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority and in the West Bank and Gaza to ensure these funds are spent in accordance with U.S. national interests and provide value to the U.S. taxpayer," a State Department official said in a statement to reporters. "As a result of that review, at the direction of the president, we...

Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people living for today Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people living life in peace You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope some day you’ll join us And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people sharing...

The protection of Palestinian civilians could be improved by the deployment of U.N.-mandated armed forces or unarmed observers, a beefed-up U.N. civilian presence or expanded U.N. assistance, Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in a report on Friday. The United Nations General Assembly requested the report in a resolution adopted in June that condemned Israel for excessive force against Palestinian civilians and denounced the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israeli civilian areas, but did not mention Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza. The resolution asked for proposals to ensure “the safety, protection and well-being of the Palestinian civilian population under...

WASHINGTON -- A former Michigan state legislator is poised to become the first Muslim woman elected to Congress after emerging on top of a crowded Democratic primary Tuesday night to fill the seat vacated by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). Conyers, the sixth-longest serving member of Congress given his election in 1965, resigned in December due to sexual harassment and his use of taxpayer money to settle a harassment claim. His western Detroit district is all but a lock for Dems, as Republicans didn't put forth a candidate. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American and socialist Dem in the mold of Sen. Bernie...