Cities Will Bear the Brunt of Trump’s Aid Cuts to Palestine

When the Trump administration suddenly cut nearly half a billion dollars in critical aid funding to Palestine within a month, the refrain in Palestine was “wait and see.” Will the money return? Will other countries step in to fill the void? Two months after those announcements, neither of these things have happened.

U.S. financial aid has been important to helping address chronic infrastructure crises in Palestine, among them, the safe provision of clean water. For the last five years, USAID provided funding to the Palestinian Community Infrastructure Development (PCID) program. The program is aimed at building large-scale infrastructure to support clean water, and with the cuts to USAID’s Palestine support, nothing like it will thrive into the future. In the city of Gaza, water access and sanitation problems had already reached crisis point, but the humanitarian crisis is worsening.