The European Union has announced a three-year financial support package for the Palestinians worth up to €1.6 billion ($1.8 billion).
“We are stepping up our support to the Palestinian people. €1.6 billion until 2027 will help stabilize the West Bank and Gaza,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas wrote on X.
Ahead of the official announcement, Dubravka Suica, the European Commissioner for the Mediterranean, said the support would go hand in hand with reforms of the Palestinian Authority, accused in the past of corruption and bad governance.
“We want them to reform themselves because without reforming, they won’t be strong enough and credible in order to be an interlocutor, not for only for us, but an interlocutor also for Israel,” Suica told Reuters.
The commissioner’s remarks came ahead of the first “high-level political dialogue” between EU foreign ministers and senior Palestinian officials in Luxembourg on Monday.
The EU is the biggest donor to the Palestinians.
EU officials have expressed hope that the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, may also one day take responsibility for Gaza after the war between Israel and Hamas militants.
WHO says child died because of Gaza hospital air strike
An Israeli air strike that hit one of Gaza’s few functioning hospitals resulted in the death of a child according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“A child died due to disruption of care” at the Al-Ahli Hospital in northern Gaza after a strike, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media late on Sunday.
“The emergency room, laboratory, emergency room X-ray machines and the pharmacy were destroyed,” he added. “The hospital was forced to move 50 patients to other hospitals. 40 critical patients couldn’t be moved.”
The Israeli military said it had targeted a Hamas “command and control center” at the hospital, a claim that the Palestinian group denied.
