BEIRUT — In remarks to reporters on Sept. 3, Lebanon’s caretaker Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil denounced the US decision to halt all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), stating that keeping the agency funded was a “matter of life or death.” For the majority of Palestinians in Lebanon, who have long relied on UNRWA’s delivery of essential services, Bassil’s claim is not much of an exaggeration.

“Historically, we have funding problems,” Fadi el-Tayyar, UNRWA’s public information officer in Lebanon, told Al-Monitor. “This is huge. This is one of the unprecedented crises.”

The United States' financial contribution amounted to more than $380 million annually, accounting for somewhere between a quarter and a third of UNRWA's funding, according to Chris Gunness, the agency's chief spokesperson. In 2017, the US contribution far outnumbered that from any other country.

According to a wide-ranging 2015 study conducted by the American University of Beirut (AUB) and UNRWA, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live in some of the worst socioeconomic conditions of any Palestinian population in the Middle East outside Gaza. In some cases, they are wholly dependent on UNRWA. As a result, it is likely that Palestinians in Lebanon will be especially hard-hit by the US action, degrading their access to life-saving health care, basic education and vital employment opportunities that many already see as inadequate.