Like many fellow residents of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Shady Choucair despaired when he heard last week that countries had halted their funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinians (UNRWA).

¡°It¡¯s a disaster. We were able to survive off the help we got from UNRWA,¡± he said in his small grocery store in the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut, where he has lived with his family for over a decade.

More than a dozen donor nations including the United States, Germany and Britain have paused their funding to the aid agency following allegations by the Israeli government that 12 of UNRWA¡¯s 13,000 Gaza employees were involved in the deadly Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas gunmen in southern Israel.