“Today President Donald Trump cut American support for the Augusta Victoria and Muqasad hospitals, about $20 million in total, and that’s after he cut $368 million from [the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] and $200 million from the Palestinian Authority and I tell you that in the end, it will be Israel to pay the price. You will be the ones to pay the salaries of the Palestinian Authority’s clerks, you will underwrite the schools and roads and health clinics and hospitals and pay wages of the doctors and nurses. Your children will go back to chasing our children in refugee camps.” That is what senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat told Al-Monitor on Sept. 8 in his office in Ramallah.
Erekat, in a mood more combative and apocalyptic than ever before, forgot his diplomatic language and spoke from the heart. “President Mahmoud Abbas has two choices: He can either fight for his honor and his legacy, or he will be thrown by the Palestinian people from his office. Are you keeping track of what Trump is doing to us? You know that the only cancer treatment center [for Palestinian patients] is at the Augusta Victoria, and now, because of pressure by [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, they have cut off $5 million that kept this center alive. You can take it out on Abbas, you can take it out on me, but why harm simple citizens, their hospitals, clinics, welfare centers? That is simply unprecedented. And what’s going on in Israel? Nothing. You are deaf, dumb and blind, completely disinterested.”
