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EU donates $12.5m to support ‘poor Palestinian families’

April 12, 2017 at 4:12 pm

The European Union (EU) announced yesterday that it would be contributing “social allowances” to 109,000 “poor Palestinian families” in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip, as part of its quarterly payments to the Palestinian Authority (PA).

According to the statement, the amount given to the PA amounts to €11.75 million ($12.5 million), and is partly funded by the European Union, and the governments of Austria and Ireland.

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Some 71,500 Palestinian families will have their social allowances covered by the funds, the statement added.

Two-thirds of those who benefit from the EU programme, which provides funds to Palestinian households in “extreme poverty”, are families living in the Gaza Strip where residents have suffered immensely in the past decade due to the ongoing Israeli military siege.