RAMALLAH (Reuters) – The European Union and the Palestinian Authority have reached an agreement that will allow hundreds of millions of euros to be released to help the occupied Palestinian territories, the President of the European Commission announced on Tuesday. , Ursula von der Leyen.
The disbursement of these funds had been frozen since the European commissioner in charge of neighborhood and enlargement, Oliver Varhelyi, a close associate of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, had made it conditional on the revision of Palestinian school textbooks in particular.
“I am happy to announce that European funds for 2021 can be disbursed quickly,” said Ursula von der Leyen during a visit to Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. “All difficulties have been removed.”
The European Commission contributes some 300 million euros to the Palestinians each year, and member states and other European institutions a similar amount, making the EU the main donor in the territories.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohamed Shtayyeh thanked the EU chief executive, who had met earlier in the day in Jerusalem with Israeli head of government Naftali Bennett, to whom she promised increased energy cooperation in the context of the war in Ukraine.
Ursula von der Leyen clarified that the EU had urgently released 25 million euros to help the Palestinian territories cope with the collapse of Ukrainian cereal exports, on which they are very largely dependent.
(Report Ali Sawafta and Nidal al-Mughrabi, French version Tangi Salaün, edited by Sophie Louet)
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