Winning hearts and minds

Same as the immigrant child separation policy, which has now turned into a child-parent unlimited imprisonment policy because of the backlash of people with conscience.  Not enough are going to care about Palestinians to create the same backlash against this move.

The Trump administration decided to significantly cut U.S. support for hospitals in East Jerusalem that serve the city’s Palestinian population. These hospitals were supposed to receive more than $20 million according to the foreign aid budget approved by the U.S. Congress for the current year, but the Trump administration decided to cut the funding in its entirety.

A State Department official told Haaretz on Thursday that this decision is part of the administration’s broader approach of cutting Palestinian aid and investing it in other priorities.

The administration deliberated for a number of weeks whether or not to include the East Jerusalem hospitals in its budget cut, since some of these hospitals are supported by influential Christian groups in the United States.

[...]

[E]arlier this year [...] congress approved the Taylor Force Act, which put severe restrictions on U.S. funding for Palestinians.

The law included a special and specific exclusion for these hospitals, which was initiated by congress after some of the powerful Christian organizations supporting these hospitals had lobbied. The lobbying effort, however, did not influence the Trump administration’s budget cuts.

[...]

Trump said Thursday that his administration has stopped giving financial aid to the Palestinians as a way of putting pressure on them to return to American-led negotiations with Israel. “I told them, we’re not paying you until we make a deal. If we don’t make a deal, we’re not paying," the U.S. president said.

  Haaretz

Evil and heartless. America is respected again, eh?

His administration has recently announced that it will cut $200 million from the aid approved earlier this year by congress for Palestinians. The vast majority of that aid was not supposed to go directly to the PA, but rather, to economic and humanitarian projects in the West Bank and Gaza.