The State Department said Tuesday that it had put a hold on $65 million of the $125 million now due to UNRWA, which distributes its assistance in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as to refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

A cut in U.S. funding for a U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees will affect regional security and could put vital health, educational and food services at risk, its chief said on Wednesday, adding he would appeal for world donations.

PLO official Hanan Ashrawi says Washington’s apparent gradual withdrawal from UN agency shows ‘it has no compunction in targeting the innocent.’

The Arab League chief charged Wednesday that a US decision to freeze crucial funding for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees was aimed at wiping out the whole issue of Palestinian refugees.

On Monday, a major from the IDF Prosecution had countered to the Judea Military Court that Tamimi has “a pattern of lawbreaking” which required that she remain in detention until the end of her trial for shoving soldiers and rock throwing.

Sources in the defense establishment have confirmed to Haaretz that the Army’s Central Command and the headquarters of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories are reviewing the possibility of assuming responsibility for security in the Shoafat refugee camp and in Kafr Aqab, Palestinian areas that are in the jurisdiction of Jerusalem but physically cut off from the city since the construction of the separation barrier.

The Havat Gilad outpost near Nablus in the northern West Bank may be difficult to retroactively legalize, as Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman has promised to do following the deadly shooting of one of its residents, Raziel Shevach, last week by a Palestinian.

Palestinian media reported last week that Israel wants $28,000 for the jeep that crushed Abdullah Ghneimat, 22, during clashes in 2015 in the village of Kafr Malek, near Ramallah. At the time, the army said the jeep flipped over a wall as its driver pursued Ghneimat, who Israeli officials said had tossed a firebomb at the jeep.

The United States embassy will move to Jerusalem within the year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said.

President Mahmoud Abbas issued a presidential decree dated Jan. 3 to reinstate the collection of taxes on the Gaza Strip. This decree abolished two previous decrees — one issued in 2007 and another from 2017 — exempting all citizens in the governorates of the Gaza Strip from paying taxes and fees.

NPR’s Kelly McEvers speaks with Tareq Baconi, a visiting scholar with Columbia University’s Middle East Institute, about ISIS’ declaration of war against Hamas. The two organizations have a history of animosity that could rock an already volatile region of the Middle East.