Posted on 10/12/2018 3:49:30 PM PDT by Olog-hai
An Israeli government study shared with Washington argues that Palestinian refugees number in the thousands, not the millions designated by a U.N. aid agency whose funding has been slashed by the Trump administration, an Israeli official said on Friday.
The fate of Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and their descendants has long clouded U.S.-sponsored peace efforts. Frustration over the issue is among factors fuelling often violent weekly protests at the Gaza border over the last half year, during which around 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces.
Palestinians demand a refugee right of return to lands now in Israel, which rejects this, insisting they settle where they are or in a future Palestinian state. Negotiations on founding that state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza stalled in 2014.
Demographics loom over the dispute. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees puts their number at some 5 million, a tally including descendants of the some 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948.
Israel says only survivors among the original 1948 refugees should be considered refugees today — an idea fiercely opposed by the Palestinian leadership, which hews to the UNRWA numbers. …
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Another reason I love the Trump administration - I can naively ask whats a Palestinian? They don’t matter anymore. Almost no US effort has been made to solve this unsolvable problem which is what it will take to solve it.
And the number, if even that large, shrinks every day, headed to zero within a decade or so. It'll be a real pleasure when UNRWA is discontinued and disbanded.
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