(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) The State of Kuwait renewed on Wednesday its commitment to contribute to the efforts of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to help the refugees and the internally-displaced people around the globe.
In a statement to the 70th session of the UN General Assembly's Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural), Anwar Nayf Al-Thafiri, member of the Kuwaiti mission to the session, said Kuwait's voluntary contributions to the UNHCR-led relief effort stem from a moral and humanitarian responsibility.
In addition to voluntary assistance by its national government and non-government institutions, Kuwait commits USD one million to the UN Refugee Agency annually, she said.
Al-Thafiri lauded the statement of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres on questions relating to refugees, returnees and displaced persons; the statement was delivered to the UNGA Third Committee yesterday.
She also commended the regional plan for responding to the Syrian crisis (2015-2016), co-led by the UNHCR and the UNDP in collaboration with the five countries hosting Syrian refugees.
She recalled the Kuwait hosted three UN international humanitarian pledging conferences on Syria in the last three years to mobilize support and raise funds for the Syrian refugees.
The conferences led to pledges by international donor amounting to USD 7.6 billion, including USD 1.03 billion from Kuwait, Al-Thafiri said, noting that a large part of the Kuwaiti funding went to the UNHCR activities in the refugee host countries.
She voiced profound concern over the suffering of the refugees and displaced people in Iraq as a result of the terrorist attacks by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Kuwait has recently completed the delivery of assistance amounting in value to USD 200 million to the internally-displaced people in Iraq, she pointed out.
On Yemen, Al-Thafiri said the instability, resulting from the Houthi coup, prompted Kuwait to donate USD 100 million to the efforts meant to cover the basic humanitarian needs of the displaced persons.
Regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, she urged the international community to apply pressures on Israel to end the prolonged suffering of the Palestinian refugees and ensure the refugees' right to return to their homeland.
Nearly five million Palestinian refugees suffer from statelessness over the last six decades due to failure of the Israeli occupation authorities to meet their obligations under the international humanitarian law, she added.
In his statement, Antonio Guterres regretted that 60 million people worldwide are forcibly displaced as a result of war and persecution. "With fifteen new or reignited conflicts in the past five years alone, the number of people forced from their homes by conflict every single day has nearly quadrupled - from under 11,000 in 2010 to 42,500 last year," he pointed out. "The corresponding increase in humanitarian needs has overwhelmed the global response capacity. We need to face the truth: the international multilateral humanitarian community - UN agencies, the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement, and NGOs - even when combining all its resources, is no longer able to provide the core protection and the basic life-saving assistance which the people we care for need and are entitled to receive," he added.
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