Category News

Hunderts of thousands of people gathered at the Vatican for the late pontiff’s funeral rites, including some of the world’s most powerful figures and those who were always Pope Francis made a point to minister to.

Around 60 other heads of state and enraging sovereigns traveled to Rome from all over the world, including US President Donald Trump. Before his burial in the church, the Vatican announced that “a group of the poor and the needy” would line Saint Mary Major Basilica’s steps in homage to the first Jesuit and first Latin American pope.

Francis’s heartfelt affection for the poor was further reinforced by the Holy See media office. The medieval Italian saint who famously renounced his family’s wealth when he joined the church was the name of the papacy that he had chosen for his papacy.

Over the past three days, Francis’ body was lying in a simple wooden coffin inside Saint Peter’s Basilica, and long lines of faithful people have already paid him homage. He passed away at the age of 88 on Monday.

With his support for immigrants and the environment, Francis won over many people in the world, whether or not they were Catholic.

Following solemn, hours-long funeral services at St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, Pope Francis’ 12-year leadership of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics has come to an end in Rome.

The 88-year-old Argentinian pontiff, who passed away earlier this week from a stroke and cardiac arrest, was laid to rest on Saturday at the Basilica of St. Mary Major in the capital of Italy.

Tens of thousands of people packed the square to watch the ceremony, which was officiated by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, with many lining up early in the morning outside the square as sunny skies arrived in Rome.

Italian authorities closed the airspace above Vatican City, stationed a torpedo ship off the coast, and deployed more than 2,500 police officers and 1,500 soldiers, according to Italian media.

14 white-gloved pallbearers carried Francis’ wooden coffin, which was inlaid with a large cross, through St. Peter’s Basilica’s main entrance to the outdoor funeral service, eliciting applause and cheers.

Royals and world leaders, including Donald Trump, the president of the United States, who frequently clashed with Francis over their starkly divergent opinions on immigration, were among the mourners.

Among the attendees were Prince William of the United Kingdom, United States Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Spanish President Emmanuel Macron, and members of the Spanish royal family.

After all, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, was present despite his initial declaration that he could not attend due to recent Russian attacks. He and Trump had their first face-to-face encounter since a contentious Oval Office fight in February, according to reports.

Following the service, according to Al Jazeera, Trump and Zelenskyy are scheduled to have a second meeting.

Other world leaders, including Presidents of Argentina, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and General Joseph Aoun of Lebanon, were also present.

A pope among the electorates

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, one of the world’s leaders, delivered a moving funeral homily, praising Francis as a tireless champion of peace and human rights.

Pope Francis, who has been confronted with the violent wars of recent years, raised his voice in support of peace and demanded that there be reason and honest negotiation to find solutions, according to Battista Re.

He also praised Francis’ landmark papal letter on climate change and his numerous visits to places like Lampedusa and Lesbos, where the pope met migrants and refugees in detention camps.

Battista Re told the audience, “His gestures and exhortations in favor of refugees and displaced people are countless.”

He praised Francis for his “pope among the people, with an open heart toward everyone” and for his informal, spontaneous manner and ability to reach “the least among us.”

A modest place of rest.

According to a report from the Vatican, Jonah Hull of Al Jazeera described the event as “utterly beautiful” and “very well received by the enormous crowd” while mentioning how spontaneous applause erupted during the historic moment.

Francis’ coffin made a 4 km (2, 5 mile) journey through the heart of Rome after the service. The Pope’s motorcade was followed by 150, 00 people, according to the Vatican, who watched the parade.

According to Hull, Francis himself made the decision to place him in St Mary Major Basilica rather than St Peter’s, according to his last will.

According to Hull, “It has a deep personal significance for Pope Francis and the Jesuit faith, which he was a part of.”

More than 250, 000 people waited in line at St. Peter’s Basilica for hours earlier this week to pay their last respects. The Vatican’s doors were kept closed to accommodate the crowds overnight.

His final resting place, a plain tomb in a historic Roman church, embodies Francis’s papacy’s humility and independence.

On the steps of St. Mary Major Basilica, a group of 40 people greeted the late pope’s coffin with white roses following the funeral. These included immigrants, homeless, prisoners, and transgender people.

In 1994, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) inaugurated its office in Palestine. Its website, which is no longer available, used to boast that since then, it has “helped four million Palestinians lead healthier and more productive lives”.

It is important to evaluate the claim that USAID was a force for good in the occupied Palestinian territories now that the agency has been shut down by US President Donald Trump’s administration.

Undoubtedly, Palestinians have been impacted by the agency’s shutdown, particularly those who receive funding for healthcare and education. Humanitarian provision was also affected, with the World Food Programme, one of the main humanitarian actors in the occupied Palestinian territories, facing major disruptions.

While the impact on the short-term is obvious, the value of USAID and other US funding is questioned in light of the Palestinian Authority’s larger political context.

I’ve spent years evaluating USAID-funded programs directly and indirectly as a researcher, and I’ve seen first-hand how they have helped to keep Israeli occupation and colonization. The US agency was far from “helping” Palestinians lead better lives, as it claimed.

A pacification strategy

In response to the wider American effort to influence and shape the political settlement between Palestinians and Israelis that was initiated by the Oslo Accords of 1994, USAID opened its West Bank and Gaza Strip office.

The so-called “peace process” promised Palestinians an independent state on the lands occupied by Israel in 1967, with a final agreement supposed to be signed by 1999. Needless to say, this agreement was never signed because Israel had no intention of achieving peace with the Palestinians and recognizing their right to self-determination.

Oslo was used to defend Israel’s repeated occupation of Palestinian occupied territories during peace talks. The creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a local governing body tasked with managing civil affairs for Palestinians in designated areas was part of this strategy.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) was initially intended as a transitional polity that would govern daily life until an independent state was established, but the US ultimately developed and closely monitored it, managing and controlling the occupied population.

In order to halt any form of resistance in the territories it controlled, the PA was required to work closely with Israeli security forces. Its two main security bodies – the Intelligence Service and the Preventive Security – were set up to fulfil this duty.

USAID was given the task of supporting the Palestinian security apparatus while US intelligence agencies were given the responsibility of funding and training it, which included millions of dollars annually in funding.

USAID assisted Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for more than $5.2 billion between 1994 and 2018. It funded infrastructure, health, and education initiatives, with the aim of winning public support for the peace negotiations.

With two primary goals in mind: to depoliticize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to establish a network of civil society actors who would support this agenda, a portion of its funding came from civil society organizations.

The Palestinian problem was seen as both an economic and humanitarian issue by the depoliticization framework. This approach addressed Palestinian economic and social problems in isolation — detached from their primary cause: Israeli occupation.

It also sought to delegitimize Palestinian resistance by portraying it as a source of chaos and instability as opposed to a political response to occupation.

USAID set up a complicated background check system as well as an Orwellian set of requirements to distribute its funding. The vetting extended beyond the individual to their extended family, the name of the place, and even the cultural context in which the funds would be used — none of which could be associated with resistance.

In light of this, it is not surprising that USAID initiatives frequently failed to improve the lives of regular Palestinians.

People-to-people programs are used to normalize the world

A lot of USAID funding went into initiatives that sought to normalise Israeli colonisation by seeking to establish connections between Palestinians and Israelis. The idea that the two people “can learn to live together,” was completely untrue, despite apartheid’s and occupation’s realities.

The Conflict Management and Mitigation (CMM) Program, promoted under the People-to-People Partnership framework by USAID, was one of the USAID-funded initiatives I evaluated. By 2018, CMM had allocated over $230m to different initiatives and was set to distribute another $250m by 2026.

To promote peacebuilding, the program included projects aimed at bereaved parents, farmers, and students. Through the sharing of farming experiences, one of these projects sought to encourage cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli farmers.

During one focus group discussion, I spoke to a Palestinian farmer who explained that Palestinian olive oil production has been stagnating due to the Israeli occupation regime that restricted Palestinian farmers ‘ access to water and, in some cases, to their land. He continued, “These programs don’t talk about these issues,” saying “these programs don’t.”

When I asked him why he had signed up, he replied that the project had given him the opportunity to work on Israeli farms and make a living off of it.

The absurdity of this dynamic was striking: on paper, the programme spoke of fostering productive relationships between Palestinians and Israelis, building a shared, peaceful future where farmers become friends. Palestinian farmers actually agreed to a travel agreement and work on Israeli farms, many of which were set up on seized Palestinian land. The participation in the program failed to address any of the issues that Palestinian olive farmers encountered due to Israeli occupation policies.

Another USAID-funded programme I studied, Seeds of Peace, had the mission to bring together young people from conflict regions who had the potential to become future leaders in their countries. A youth summer camp in a wealthy part of the US state of Maine, where participants engaged in dialogue and leadership training, was the program’s main activity.

Israelis and Palestinians were the two largest participants. While the Israeli Ministry of Education was responsible for selecting Israeli participants, the Seeds of Peace office in Ramallah oversaw the recruitment of Palestinian participants. A program with high costs, costing up to $8, 000 per person, was offered to each participant.

A closer examination of participant lists over time revealed a startling pattern: wealthy families and their children frequently appeared.

Curious about this pattern, I once asked a programme officer about it. The response was revealing, stating that “leadership frequently passes to the children of high-ranking officials in Palestinian society.”

In order to achieve this, the organization’s and, consequently, the US’s, assumed that the current elite’s vision of political leadership in Palestine should be prioritized over its sons and daughters.

Political interference

Not just the PA cadres and their families were supported by Seeds of Peace, by far. Some high-ranking officials’ relatives have benefited from special treatment while securing lucrative USAID contracts, while others have taken the lead of nonprofit organizations that the agency has funded.

USAID has also been involved indirectly in the political scene in Palestine by supporting political actors favoured by Washington.

In the days before the 2006 legislative elections, it ran an extensive democracy promotion program in the Palestinian territories. Although there is no concrete evidence that a particular candidate or party list received funding from USAID, observers have come across reports that CSOs connected to Fatah or the Third Way candidates. In some cases, this support was channeled through organisations operating in unrelated sectors.

These organizations were unable to secure enough seats to stop Hamas from winning the election despite substantial funding and political support. USAID continued to support Palestinian CSOs even after Hamas gained control of Gaza, sometimes dramatically increasing their funding.

USAID also supported the police force under the PA through rule of law programmes, although the bulk of funding for the PA’s repressive security apparatus has come through the CIA and the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) of the US Department of State.

The US military constructed a malfunctioning pier in 2024 to facilitate the delivery of aid into Gaza, at a cost of $ 230 million, which is a more recent and illustrative illustration of problematic USAID involvement. USAID was one of the organizations tasked with dispersing the trickle of aid that came through the project because it was referred to as a humanitarian initiative.

In reality, the pier served as a public relations stunt by the administration of former US President Joe Biden to obscure US complicity in Israel’s blockade of Gaza. The Israeli military also used it in an operation that resulted in the deaths of more than 200 Palestinians, which raises serious questions about the militarization and misuse of aid infrastructure.

The Palestinians’ humanitarian aid was never done in their best interests, according to the pier farce.

It is true that some impoverished Palestinians may be affected by the shutdown of USAID operations in the West Bank and Gaza. However, it’s unlikely to significantly alter the local circumstances. The US’s strategy of using Palestinian civil society organizations to advance a pacification agenda and perpetuate empty rhetoric about peace will be affected more dramatically by the aid cutoff.

In this regard, the shuttering of USAID could give an opportunity for the Palestinian civil society to reconsider its engagement with US government donors in light of its moral obligations to the Palestinian people. It is time for a new strategy that actually serves the interests of the Palestinians, after billions of dollars were clearly spent on pacification.