Julie Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia. Photo: wiki commons.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr announced that the country agreed to give $90 million in aid to Palestinian refugees over the next five years, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

“I’m very proud to say that since 2007 we’ve helped 470,000 Palestinian children attend school including more than 200,000 girls and supported 4,200 health workers,” Carr said. The new agreement will “build on those gains,” he said.

Carr, who met May 28 with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), echoed the Palestinian narrative when he said there could be more than 5 million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. According to Middle East Forum founder Daniel Pipes, only 1 percent of the refugees served by UNRWA fit the agency’s definition of “people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” The other 99 percent are descendants of refugees.